This week on the Gondola Project forum, in response to last week’s post about the future of aerial transit, there was a video response with the Jetson’s theme song displaying the idea of personalized flying mobiles. This got me thinking about both science fiction and outer space (since everything in that show appears to be hoovering in the air). Logically this brought me to contemplating a space gondola with rotating stations and carbon nanotube cables (how else?!).
Possible? Likely? A transit line worthwhile?
This discussion to continue on the forum in 3… 2… 1… [click]
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1st April is far out of range. Nevermind the technology. Who would enter the gondola at the poles? How long would it take to get to the moon? Is it a 3S? 😉
Haha – is this a call for investors?
I can’t even imagine the size of motor you’d need to pull that off. Would it even be possible to physically pull something out of the gravitational field at relatively low speeds? LOL
Apologies in advance for giving an unsought serious answer to this proposal…
The diagram suggests that the rotation of the earth and moon would drive this system, so no motor would be required. However the moon doesn’t rotate relative to the earth, so the earth would have to do all the work with a free pulley at the moon end.
You’d have to be careful not to overtighten the cable or you’d eventually cause the moon to fall into the earth.
Using the earth’s energy in this way will eventually cause the earth to stop rotating, resulting in runaway heating and freezing on opposite sides of the planet. We should be ok because by this time we should have figured out how to live in hostile environments from our colonisation of the moon, but we would have wrecked a habitable planet in the process.
You’d eventually cause the moon to crash into the earth anyway – even a small pull over a long time would do it.
However, if we first pushed the moon away from the earth beyond a stable orbit, we could have a constant tension from a cable without pulling the moon inward. This is how space elevators work.
Of course, if the cable ever snapped the moon would shoot off into space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
The plane of the moon’s orbit is close to the plane of our orbit around the sun, so just as the sun spends half the year below the horizon at the poles, so too with the moon. For this reason, it will never be possible to connect either pole to the moon with a cable.
Here are things that might eventually be possible:
1. We can build a space elevator from some equatorial location that dramatically reduces the cost of escaping Earth’s gravity.
2. We may also be able to build one on the moon (it would need to be taller due to the moon’s slow rotation)..
3. Okay, what happen’s if you ascend the space elevator to past the point of geosynchronous orbit, then let go of the cable? You go into an eliptical orbit that intitially gets further and further from the Earth, slowing down as it goes, then starts coming back to the Earth. So a ship could pick a height and time this to be flung toward the moon’s elevator. If you built sufficiently tall elevator’s and built the moon’s elevator on the far side, you could have a ship that attaches to one elevator, releases at just the right time, attaches to the other, releases at the right time, and needs very little fuel to make adjustments to dock to each elevator. This journey would take around 2 weeks. Great for freight, kind of slow for people, but then again if we had a space elevator we could build larger cruise ships by sending them up in pieces and assembling them in orbit.