Saturday, December 15, 2012

Space Elevator?

 
The video from YouTube above shows how the trajectory of space shuttle in each of it launch. So I was searching for the way how engineers would build the so called Space Elevator one day if it would ever be realized despite of many challenging problems.
Now I know that of course it's not gonna use super heavy rocket to lift the whole structure up in orbit. ahahahaha....  I remember when someone posted this topic on Facebook group. spontaneously I came with that question "if that thing would ever be realized, then how to build the whole structure? "

Yes... It turns out that the idea is to maintain the center of mass of the whole body of "orbiting structure" in such way that it wont move from the place where it floats during the construction. So imagine that we already put the base on the geosyncrhonous orbit, we can then start the construction by lifting material each fragment on the orbit. And then, we maintain the system center of mass. In doing so, we span the mass down to earth as well as up away from earth in such way that the balance between gravity and centripetal force remain constant.

It would be so much challenging and, as I said, this is just the basic idea.