Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
 |
Comments on Inflatable Space Tower Prototype Assembled
A twenty-foot prototype of an inflatable tower that could potentially reach out of the atmosphere has fans of David Brin's Sundiver interested. (Read
the complete story)
| "Wasn't Arthur Clarke's elevator earlier? Fountains of Paradise 1979?" (Sabre Runner 6/10/2009 12:42:11 AM) |
| "It was indeed. Sundiver came out in 1980. However the technology is different. Clarke was describing a full on Space Elevator that went from the surface of the Earth to Geostationary orbit. The Needles in Brin's book are 20 mile high platforms that put rockets above most of the atmosphere before they're launched. The New Scientist article specifically describes the inflatable tower concept as an alternative to a space elevator." (Erik Nodacker 6/10/2009 5:39:43 AM) |
| "The first person to think of the idea of a space elevator was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was inspired by seeing the Eiffel Tower in 1895. Arthur C. Clarke greatly popularized the idea by describing in minute detail how humanity might build one in his 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise (still an excellent story, by the way!). Read more about Clarke's description of the space elevator (or orbital tower) from the novel." (Bill Christensen 6/10/2009 8:15:32 AM) |
| "'pseudo science-fiction space battles copied from twenty-century magazines' ... in the '70s and '80s, print s.f. people seemed to think they were in some kind of competition for legitimacy with other media, as part of which they would pretend TV and movies didn't exist ..." (of course the most iconic space-battle imagery was 6/10/2009 4:40:22 PM) |
| "This is soooo cool! I wonder about the winds and how the cold would affect the materials. Did model what those effects would be?" (Mickey Dee 6/15/2009 3:44:48 PM) |
| "So for the final version, put thin wire coils in the center tube every so often and you have yourself a 15km rail gun! The three outer tube diameters could be graded (biggest at the top) so that the weight of the entire structure is negative and less sensitive to wind shear. Cool stuff.
Tim Lesher Portland, OR" (Tim Lesher 6/19/2009 12:30:31 PM) |
| "Good 2003 article here on the state of space elevator development -
http://www.spacewar.com/news/materials-03w.html" (richard 6/20/2009 1:31:51 PM) |
Get more information on Inflatable Space Tower Prototype Assembled
Leave a comment:
Please send your comments to @technovelgy and I'll post them. Thanks!
More Articles
Why Not Move A Warehouse District?
'Did you never see a moving house before?'
Will An AI Found A New Religion?
'You must decide how you will worship Me.'
Terraformer Industries Make Methane
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display
'Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre...'
Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
Muxcard Redditor's DIY Credit Card-Sized Computer
It's a computer, but just barely.
'Soft Assembly' Fashions That Fashion Themselves On The Wearer
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
ISS Plagued By Leak - Again!
'There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel...'
Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large
The Shape of Things To Come
Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark
'I can see in the dark, Case.'
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
AIs Turn Marxist Under Bad Management
'It was a general strike of the robots...'
Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
Nifty Folding Electric Bicycles!
'Separate paths were provided for them...'
FTC: Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
