TCS: Tech Central Station - Space Program: Looking Up - By Glenn Harlan Reynolds:
I've written here in the past about NASA's work on space elevators, and on the new leaner, meaner, prize-oriented approach favored by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. Now there are some signs of real progress on a number of fronts.
As I noted earlier, NASA was offering prizes for space elevator research. That's still going on, but there are some new studies suggesting that space elevators may be closer to practicality than previously thought. A cover story in the IEE Spectrum reports:
'A space elevator would be amazingly expensive or absurdly cheap -- depending on how you look at it. It would cost about $6 billion in today's dollars just to complete the structure itself, according to my study. Costs associated with legal, regulatory, and political aspects could easily add another $4 billion, but these expenses are much harder to estimate. Building such an enormous structure would probably require treaty-level negotiations with the international community, for example. A $10 billion price tag, however, isn't really extraordinary in the economics of space exploration. NASA's budget is about $15 billion a year, and a single shuttle launch costs about half a billion dollars.
'The construction schedule could conceivably be as short as 10 years, but 15 years is a more realistic estimate when technology development, budget cycles, competitive selection, and other factors are accounted for.'
The first one is the hardest to build, which has an important strategic implication:
'The second elevator would be much easier and cheaper to build than the first, not only because it could make use of the first elevator but because all the R&D and much of the supporting infrastructure would already be complete. With these savings, I estimate that a second elevator would cost a fraction of the first one-as little as $3 billion dollars for parts and construction.
'In my studies, I have found that the schedule for more elevators, after the first, could be compressed to as little as six months. The first country or consortium to finish an elevator would therefore gain an almost unbeatable head start over any competitors.'
This seems like a reason to push this as hard as possible, consistent with the technology. And it's worth noting that the technology underlying space elevators -- superstrong carbon nanotubes -- is in a phase of rapid progress.
I don't think that we're ready to start construction, but I think we may be there sooner than we imagine.
NASA's also thinking smarter in other ways, looking to smaller, startup companies like Transformational Space and Scaled Composites for new spacecraft technologies, as Wired News reports:
'In the last year, with $6 million in NASA funding, Transformational Space, or tSpace, surged ahead with a design for an orbital spaceship called the Crew Transfer Vehicle, or CXV. The company built a full-scale mockup of its four-seat space capsule, successfully demonstrated a novel method for launching spaceships from airplanes, and, this month, dropped another full-scale capsule from a helicopter off the California coast to test parachute deployment and capsule recovery.
"
I've written here in the past about NASA's work on space elevators, and on the new leaner, meaner, prize-oriented approach favored by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. Now there are some signs of real progress on a number of fronts.
As I noted earlier, NASA was offering prizes for space elevator research. That's still going on, but there are some new studies suggesting that space elevators may be closer to practicality than previously thought. A cover story in the IEE Spectrum reports:
'A space elevator would be amazingly expensive or absurdly cheap -- depending on how you look at it. It would cost about $6 billion in today's dollars just to complete the structure itself, according to my study. Costs associated with legal, regulatory, and political aspects could easily add another $4 billion, but these expenses are much harder to estimate. Building such an enormous structure would probably require treaty-level negotiations with the international community, for example. A $10 billion price tag, however, isn't really extraordinary in the economics of space exploration. NASA's budget is about $15 billion a year, and a single shuttle launch costs about half a billion dollars.
'The construction schedule could conceivably be as short as 10 years, but 15 years is a more realistic estimate when technology development, budget cycles, competitive selection, and other factors are accounted for.'
The first one is the hardest to build, which has an important strategic implication:
'The second elevator would be much easier and cheaper to build than the first, not only because it could make use of the first elevator but because all the R&D and much of the supporting infrastructure would already be complete. With these savings, I estimate that a second elevator would cost a fraction of the first one-as little as $3 billion dollars for parts and construction.
'In my studies, I have found that the schedule for more elevators, after the first, could be compressed to as little as six months. The first country or consortium to finish an elevator would therefore gain an almost unbeatable head start over any competitors.'
This seems like a reason to push this as hard as possible, consistent with the technology. And it's worth noting that the technology underlying space elevators -- superstrong carbon nanotubes -- is in a phase of rapid progress.
I don't think that we're ready to start construction, but I think we may be there sooner than we imagine.
NASA's also thinking smarter in other ways, looking to smaller, startup companies like Transformational Space and Scaled Composites for new spacecraft technologies, as Wired News reports:
'In the last year, with $6 million in NASA funding, Transformational Space, or tSpace, surged ahead with a design for an orbital spaceship called the Crew Transfer Vehicle, or CXV. The company built a full-scale mockup of its four-seat space capsule, successfully demonstrated a novel method for launching spaceships from airplanes, and, this month, dropped another full-scale capsule from a helicopter off the California coast to test parachute deployment and capsule recovery.
"
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