Another cheap orbital insertion idea: lets build some towers. Big
ones, dwarfing anything on earth today. I am talking about a tower
22300 miles high. Three of them, in fact. To top it off, how about
a space station with a radius of 42240 km? Want to go to orbit? Just
hop on the elevator to the geosynchronous ring.

The launch system proposed by Josh Hall (100km high electromagnetic launchplatform built with advanced nanotechnology) may be well-nigh-impossible,but, as Josh points out, is considerably easier to build than a geosynchronousspace elevator.
Ed Minchau wrote:
Another cheap orbital insertion idea: lets buildsome towers. Big
ones, dwarfing anything on earth today. I am talking about atower
22300 miles high. Three of them, in fact. To top it off,how about
a space station with a radius of 42240 km? Want to go to orbit?Just
hop on the elevator to the geosynchronous ring.
The towers would have to be flexible, lightweight, etc, but once the
geosynchronous ring is complete, its own mass would hold the towers
up! In fact, the towers would probably be built after the
geosynchronous ring, literally top-down.
Think big,
:) ed
Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html
The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.
I think we should:
1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failurerate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels willneed to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.
2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroidare
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about500 times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand spacecolonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.
3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need theircolony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearbystars.
Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.