Jeremy Keith, one of the instigators of the first Science Hack Day, spent the weekend thinking about the space elevators, a beloved piece of not-yet-existing technology. His hack, Spacelift is an interactive table that compares the costs of getting spacecraft payloads into geosynchronous orbit using a space elevator instead of a traditional rocket. He writes, “By far the trickiest info to track down was the mass of fictional spacecraft,” he writes, but “having such smart, helpful people around made the whole exercise a joy. It was quite a pleasure to walk over to a group of hackers, ask ‘Is anyone here a rocket scientist?’ and have at least one person raise their hand.”
The cost calculation is not for developing the technology or for developing and assembling them, but just for how much it would cost to move the weight into orbit using different current or near current modes of transportation.
Note – you have scroll over to the right to get ships from Farscape and Star Wars. Below is a tiny sample at the 1X dimension.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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