From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Fri Aug 23 2002 - 16:54:38 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>One aspect of space elevators everybody seems to ignore (mostly because
>they are engineering exercises right now and not serious proposals) is
>liability. While the fall of a broken elevator might not be a
>super-disaster, so many people would consider themselves threatened that
>the insurance demands would be extreme. NIMBY might be the greatest
>problem, not tensile strength.
>
A very astute observation by Anders. However the direct threat
to humans by a falling cable would not be the driver for cost of
insuring the lofy scheme. It would rather be the risk of operational
satellites striking the cable and causing a meltdown of LEO assets
due to the resulting expanding cloud of particulates left in orbit to
hit other sats.
Recall that every satellite must cross the equatorial plane twice
every orbit, regardless of inclination, and furthermore the risk
of collision is inversely proportional to the sine of the angle of
inclination. AC Clarke's scheme of placing the entire structure
in a first bending mode resonance doesn't help a bit (altho it did
help the story along in Songs of Distant Earth.)
In the afore mentioned paper, I estimated the collective cross
section of all orbitting assets and figured about a 45% chance
of a collision in the first year the cable was in place.
spike
>
>
>On the other hand, if you have the elevator you have just cornered the
>satelite telecom market of a third of the Earth...
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:22 MST