And now with the European Space Agency and the Japanese getting into the Space Race alongside the US, Russia and China... it could be like the high tech Olympics.
The Olympics are a competition between athletes and nations, but they are also a wonderful cooperative effort. If space could be explored with that same spirit (barring Salt Lake City recruiting scandals) it would be wondrous!
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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By the way, those interested in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series might like to know that a new literary research project on the series has begun on The Demimonde, a forum for Kim Stanley Robinson Fans.
Please, go check it out.
Posts: 2506 | Registered: Jul 2003
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The space elevator blew out in Red Mars? Was it just a mention to how it had happened in the past? I do not recall any detailed description of a Space Elevator failure in the book.
I shall have to model it in Nastran 4D.
Hmm.....23,500 miles of stuff...at 100 mile segments, that would be 235 segments. Plus, I'd have to convert the bottom segment to 20 segment @ 5 miles each, and.....
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Thousands of Kilometers of "bucky-cable" wrapped around the planet what, three times! It created a band of diamonds near the equator of Mars. A very important event in the novels, because the UNTA controlled it, and was using it to import troops to quell the "Rebellion of '61".
quote:ssywak wrote: Popular Science: I don't have that article in front of me, but it amounted to, "as soon as we can develop the material to make such a plan work, we can start building it." Same goes for transparent aluminum, by the way. In other words, that's an incredibly big "if."
Um. Haven't they already created a molecule that can do this? I believe it's Carbon 60, buckminster fullerene, otherwise known as "bucky balls", from which you can make "bucky tubes" which have incredibly high tensile strength. Currently it's incredibly expensive to make, although most of the experts in nanotechnology say we'll have self replicating nanotechnology in 20 years, which will probably help...that and the exponential increase in technology factor...
Edit: The high tensile thing I got from A. C. Clarke, and KSR. The rest is pretty well known fact, though.
quote:Thousands of Kilometers of "bucky-cable" wrapped around the planet what, three times! It created a band of diamonds near the equator of Mars. A very important event in the novels, because the UNTA controlled it, and was using it to import troops to quell the "Rebellion of '61".
That was a very cool scene.
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