Space Elevator

(*DING!!!*) Going up! Climb aboard, step to the back please, make room for the others… Now, what floor are you going to? Stratosphere? Ionosphere?

Those of you who are into science journals and other techno-geeky publications have already heard of the Space Elevator, a conceptual design for a revolutionary little toy that will change the nature of space travel. For those of you who haven’t, brace yourself. And hold the door for that lady, she’s got a kid in a stroller.

What’s the biggest problem with sending a vehicle into space? While you’re thinking on that one, here’s a related question: what is the biggest payload we take on every single rocket we send up?

Think about the design of the space shuttle. The actual shuttle is just like a weird looking plane: why don’t we just make it take off like a plane does? Just slide it along the runway, ease back on the stick, and glide that sucker right into the great beyond?

The answer is apparent when you look at the shuttle on the launch pad. The shuttle itself is attached to these big honking tanks and rockets. Spoils the whole look if you asked me. Why do they do it that way? Because of the questions I just posed.

The biggest problem we have sending a vehicle into space isn’t breathing or eating or going to the bathroom or astronauts who puke inside their pressure suits. The problem is, breaking free of earth’s gravity. The way we do it is with rockets that propel the vehicle at a ridiculous rate of speed. For this you need a massive amount of thrust — and a massive amount of fuel, which necessarily becomes the biggest payload on board any rocket we send up.

Every shuttle mission uses up something like 95% of its fuel in the first three minutes of the mission. That much fuel requires a pretty big set of fuel tanks, and they are immensely heavy. But the more the vehicle weighs, the more fuel you need. So you need a bigger tank to hold more fuel, which of course weighs more, which requires more fuel, and so on, and so on. The long and short of it is, you reach a certain point past which it is impractical to add size to the machine. We are very close to that point.

But we want to explore Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and beyond. It takes more than a year to get to any of those places, and in order to make it so people can live for that length of time in space, you need supplies. Food, water, oxygen, toothpaste, reruns of “Grey’s Anatomy” on DVD. But if we build a ship big enough to carry all those things, we can’t get it into space because it’s too big and heavy.

So what’s the solution? Build the vehicle in space, supply it in space, and launch it from space. All of a sudden you don’t have to have umpteen million cubic meters of liquid hydrogen fuel, you can build the vehicle as big as the state of Rhode Island if you want, and to send it on its way you can just give it a shove with your pinky finger. Zero gravity is a beautiful thing.

That solution, given our present means of getting people and stuff into space, is impractical. It costs tens of millions of dollars for one shuttle mission. Each shuttle mission can carry a payload about the size and weight of a Hummer. At that rate, we would spend endless multiples of the GNP of the entire world, only to have a mission that launches sometime in the year 2874. It just won’t work.

Enter the Space Elevator.

Drive a nail into a tennis ball. Tie a string around the nail, and hold the end of the string in your hand. Now stand in the middle of a (large) room. Spin around with your arms outstretched. What happens? Anybody around stares at you kinda funny, and the tennis ball pulls the string taught until you slow down. Okay, so what?

Back in the early part of the 20th century a science fiction writer suggested that this was possible with the earth. Shoot a cable with a weight on it out into space, tether it to the ground, and the rotation of the earth will pull the cable taught and hold it there. Crazy, right?

The best that we can tell, he was right. It works.

Again, so what? Well, what do most elevators run on?

Long cables.

Starting to see this now?

Long story short (too late!) what we’re talking about here is a platform, powered from the ground by a laser, with the capability of lifting (for instance) ten tons, that can run a payload up the cable into low-earth orbit a hundred times a day at a unit cost of enough electricity to power the laser.

This is the Space Elevator. And the new era begins.

So, two components: a cable and a platform. We’re almost there on the platform. A team from the University of Saskatchewan ran a small ground-laser-powered platform up a 100 foot cable in 54 seconds just a couple of months ago. They missed winning the $100,000 prize NASA is offering by just four seconds. They’ll get it next time. Figure in ten years, the platform will be ready.

The problem is the cable. With current materials, any cable strong enough to hold a weight screaming around with the earth at in excess of 1000 miles per hour at an altitude of over 300 miles is so big and heavy we’d never get it off the ground.

But that’s not always going to be the case. Go search the web for something called carbon nanotubes. They are a tubular atom-thickness structure of a carbon allotrope with unique conductive properties and exceptional elastic modulus— Oh, never mind all that. Fashion a woven thread such as you would use to sew on a button made from carbon nanotubes, and that thread will be strong enough to pick your car up off the ground. Put simply, when we are able to manufacture carbon nanotubes in enough quantity and at low enough cost, this is the material that will be used for the cable. The one used for the Space Elevator shouldn’t have to be any more than an inch thick.

Just think of it. Space exploration, sure. But think of the commercial applications! The government builds 200 of these things, uses 20 or so for its own purposes, and funds the entire program by leasing either runs of the platform or entire elevators to private companies. All of a sudden you’re buying a trip around the world (in 45 minutes at an altitude of 240 miles) as a graduation present for your teenager! Low-earth-orbit factories that send up purified titanium alloy and send down geometrically flawless sphere ball bearings — only possible in zero-gravity. Satellite launch platforms, medical research labs, schools, commercial space flight centers, atmospheric and environmental impact study facilities, Starbucks, you name it!

And if it is possible on the earth, it will be possible with other celestial bodies too: the moon and Mars most immediately. From the earth’s surface up the elevator to a platform, onto an interplanetary shuttle, across to a platform outside Mars’ atmosphere, and down the elevator to the surface of Mars. We could have a low-cost supply line of surface-to-surface transfer in both directions: machines and personnel outbound, minerals and scientific samples inbound. Once we find out what’s actually on those rocks, who knows what we’ll be dragging back. This makes outposts (or even permanent colonies) on both of those planets a very real possibility.

My kids will see this in their lifetime. I hope I see it in mine. This, stem cell research and the human genome project will permanently alter our reality in the next 50 years. You heard it here first.

For The Kids

We deal with school-related issues a lot around our house. Our daughter has a disability, so when it comes to the average kids’ rules and regulations, classes and schedules, all bets are off. We have “team” meetings at least six times a year discussing everything from which set of teachers she will have next year, to what to do about gym class, to how she is going to go on the bus to a field trip. Long and short, we’re well-versed in the process for navigating the school administration maze.

Today I heard about a worsening situation across the country with respect to the handling of twins in the classroom. At a certain point in the history of child development research somebody determined that the best way to deal with twins in the classroom was to split them up. This, they argued, would help them establish their individuality, assert themselves as autonomous beings, and grow through the same kind of outside-the-comfort-zone experience as the other kids in their class. The educational community adopted this theory as gospel en masse, and so in most districts around the country this is now an inflexible policy.

The problem with this, obviously, is that there are sets of twins out there who will react severely to this separation. Right or wrong, certain sets of twins are physically and emotionally dependent upon each other. To separate the children from one another not only imparts a completely unnecessary stressor on the children, but serves as a substantial impediment to their education: the very thing these educators were trying to improve.

The use of fertility drugs and the success of in-vitro fertilization has caused a multiple-baby boom in the U.S., and the rate of twin births is exponentially higher than it was when the study of twins in the classroom was done. Subsequently, this problem has multiplied to the point where four states now have legislation on the books giving parents the right to veto the school district’s classroom assignment of their children, and other states have legislation pending.

The opposite side of this argument is that public schools’ resources are limited, and despite the laughable “No Child Left Behind” edict from the experienced educators in Washington D.C., there is no way the average school can even attempt to accommodate the needs of every single student on an individual basis. Administrators and teachers would spend the first three months of school attending meetings and making adjustments to everything from classroom assignments to lunchroom menus to ambient temperature. It’s simply not possible. So why should the schools make accommodations for one group of students and not the rest?

Additionally, the argument goes, if the public school experience isn’t right for your child, you have the option of private school or home schooling. Don’t stretch the school’s resources (and the staff’s patience) by trying to mold the school into something it isn’t.

Who’s right?

In this case, the parents. The school should be in the business of educating, not molding the psyche of a given student or group of students. If it spent as much time focusing on the three R’s as it did on this type of thing, we probably wouldn’t be dropping behind the rest of the world on standardized test scores. “Free and public” education applies to every student, not just the ones who fit into the cookie-cutter mold the school district has carved out as their target audience. This reasonable accommodation of keeping twin siblings in the same classroom at the request of the parents doesn’t cost a cent (beyond the time the administrators waste arguing with parents) and is absolutely the least they can do.

Oh, but is that the solution all the time? Can every issue with respect to a child’s education be resolved by adhering to the “customer is always right” philosophy? Methinks not so much.

Why *is* the US falling behind every industrialized nation in nearly every subject you can mention? Lack of standards. Unlike every other country, the America puts the matter of curriculum in the hands of the individual school districts, who are free to teach nothing but animal husbandry and Lithuanian if they choose to. Everywhere else, above a certain age (roughly middle-school) if you can’t pass your end-of-year exams, you don’t move on to the next grade — period.

Here we pass out diplomas like candy at Halloween. The rest of the world puts a priority on making sure that the diploma *means* something. The result? Students in other countries perform steadily better on standardized tests than our students do. This is a case where parental involvement in our children’s education is actually hurting them. Having standards for curricula set by seasoned educators instead of Joe-Bob Goober down the street is an absolute necessity if our children are to compete in what is already a global economy.

How Not To Be Seen

Since the attacks on 9/11 the western world has been asking the question, “Where is Osama Bin Laden?” So far, nobody has been able to answer that question. So while the military minds and intelligence wonks have come up empty, it’s probably time to open it up for suggestions from the cheap seats.

So here’s my theory.

If I’m a dissident religious zealot with essentially unlimited resources who has just pulled off the most successful sneak attack in the history of modern terrorism, and I have a desire to keep my internal body temperature at 98.6, I want to make sure people who eat hamburgers, smoke Marlboros and drink Budweiser can’t find me. How do I do that?

I would go to the last place anybody would ever think to look. So okay, where is that?

Not Afghanistan, not Pakistan, not Iran or Iraq. All of those places are swarming with US military or US intelligence agents. Probably not most Southeast Asian or Middle-Eastern countries either, because thanks to Al Jazeera, I’m a bona fide Muslim rock star to these people. If there is such a thing.

What about Africa? Lots of space, lots of different cultures, lots of places to blend in. But not a lot of infrastructure to allow me to easily communicate with my network of minions positioned around the globe. Depending on where I am and what kind of communications risks I’m willing to take, it may take months for me to get accurate information about the world and distribute messages to my various cells across the globe.

Plus, even though I’m not a flash-my-wad-of-cash-to-the-barista-at-Starbucks kind of zealot, I do want to be able to have access to and play around with my vast wealth. Not a lot of ways to do that in Africa without arousing suspicion.

I hear Australia is nice this kind of year. But the Muslim population is very sparse, and thanks to the dolts who blew up the disco in Malaysia, it’s not exactly the best place to be wearing a turban.

South America? Possible. Don’t think anybody is looking there. But thanks to drug running, military juntas and goofball dictators spewing expletives at the evil Americans, there are probably more U.S. agents between Panama and Peru than there are between Baltimore and Norfolk. So that may not be the best choice.

Where does that leave? Europe? Russia? China? I don’t think so. I’m going to go the *last* place anybody would look.

Right under everybody’s nose.

That’s right, people, Osama Bin Laden is here. Probably in New York City.

Think about it. Massive crowd to disappear into, endless communication and transportation options, 24/7 news channels to keep tabs on what the U.S. is up to, and to top it all off, some of the most authentic Qabelee Palaw outside of Kandahar.

Look next to you on the subway. Check the crowd at the next 9/11 memorial service. Look in the crowd at the next Mets game. He’s probably reading this blog… right… now…