/sci/ - Science & Math

Just set up something to turn an iron rich near Earth asteroid into cable and keep spooling it out until the end makes it round the planet and comes back to you.

For bonus points, get it moving a bit faster than orbital velocity and hang stuff off of it to make yourself a space elevator that doesn't need cables made of carbon nanotubes.

Start by disassembling the various moons of the planet and turning them into an orbital ring running around Jupiter, just outside the fringes of it's upper atmosphere. You may want build further layers of rings while you're at it, depending on what you're planning to do with the material and if you're going to be moving a lot of stuff into and out of it's gravity well.

You now need to put a few trains on your orbital ring and dangle facilities from them into the atmosphere of the planet. You can then use these to start hauling the gas out of the planet's gravity well. This will take a fair amount of energy, but you're going to have a vast supply of hydrogen and helium so if you can manage a fusion reactor you should have all the power you need.

This will be slow at first, but you can keep adding in more orbital rings and harvesting stations and scale up your mining as much as you want, as you will have a nearly endless supply of power in the form of the planet you are disassembling.

Also, don't forget to save some hydrogen/helium fuel to power your miners when you get to the rocky core, as you probably won't be able to burn that as fuel while you're mining it.

>>7143136

It would be cheaper still to colonize the Moon and LEO. One of the main draws I find for Venus is it's Earth-like gravity. We've done plenty of studying of the effects of micro-gravity on board the ISS, but our understanding of partial gravity is still severely lacking. Venus colonisation removes that risk.

also, on escaping the gravity well of Venus: any attempt to seriously colonise the planet would have to start with a megastructure for getting onto and out of the atmosphere. A convention space elevator would be impossible with the 4 day period of a floating city, but something like an orbital ring could work.

>>6993677

If you just want to go to a low-gravity near-vacuum, why not just go to the Moon? Venus is interesting because it's Earth-like.

The dV needed to get off the planet is a bit of a moot point anyway. If you're going to colonise another planet, you'll set up an orbital ring or other megastructure before hand for easy access to and from your colonies.

>>6716451
>Furthermore, a space ring brings no benefits over a simple space elevator.

A key benefit to an orbital ring is that you don't have to get up to geostationary in one single step. This means you can make your elevator out of kevlar or something, rather than trying to make a 36,000 km long cable out of something that doesn't exist yet.

We will probably never build a space elevator as there's far better mega-structures available to get into space.

If you're having a large scale exodus off of Earth it will always better to just stay in space. No sense in putting yourself down another gravity well. But if you need to be on a planet, my vote's for Venus.

Rocket fuel's not an issue. If you're already in space, you'll just set up an orbital ring and drop cables down to the planet. You might as well get any resources for stuff from asteroids, as a lack of any serious surface geology on both planets means you'll probably have a hard time fishing up anything more interesting than basalt. There's also fuck all energy out by Mars, a key resource people seem to ignore.

>>6074624

Orbital rings are perfectly reasonably space mega-structures. They're way to support something that goes all the way up to geostationary so you don;t have to worry about making a cable 36, 000 km long.

Of course, you need plenty of stuff in orbit in the first place to make it and it wouldn't be much good for attaching solar panels to, as it should be little more than a huge strip of iron.

Space elevators won't work on Earth. Our gravity's just too strong and our atmosphere's too volatile. It's all well and good having a material that can support a cable made out of itself 35,000 kilometers, but that cable will have to hold up the weight of a layer to protect it against micrometeorites, various small stations along it's length to help it avoid space debris, a good number of cars and their cargo and all kinds of stuff to help deal with the end stuck in Earth's atmosphere.

In my opinion, the best way to get space elevator levels of access to space is:
1. Build a launch loop.
2. Use it to get some serious manufacturing potential in space, and launch up massive amounts of iron/capture an asteroid.
3. Build an orbital ring with this iron a couple of thousand kilometers off the equator.
4. Drop far easier to maintain cables from this ring down to Earth
5. With easy access to space, build cables from geostationary to the orbital ring at your leisure.

My personal preference would be to build a launch loop or two, then use those to work on an orbital ring.

>>4111807

I don't think the ease of getting of the surface should be a major consideration. If we are thinking about colonizing other worlds, we probably have some kind of easy access to space already in place, such as a space elevator or orbital ring. Chances are the first thing we would do when getting to a new planet is to drop a cable down from orbit to the surface, so we don't have to worry about producing lots of rocket fuel.

Space elevators are going to be a pain. It's al well and good waving around carbon nanotubes, bt you can't just make a shaft of solid carbon 22,000 km high. It's going to need to be coated in something to protect from micrometeorites/ the atmosphere. It's going to need stations along it's length keeping an eye on it. It's going to need lights near the bottom so planes don't crash into it at night, and a lick of paint so they don't do the same during the day. All this stuff's going to add up.

My personal preference? Build a few launch loops. Use these to catapult huge amounts of iron into LEO, or fire some tugs into space to pull some iron rich asteroids down into LEO. Assemble all this iron into a huge ring and spin the ring slightly faster than the orbit speed. You can then build a few stations along the ring, make them run around it so they keep station with the ground below them, then drop a few cables down to the surface. The cables are only a few hundred miles long so they don't need to be made of something we can't make yet.

>>2573298

The orbital ring is a nice concept, but it kind or relies on you having a large presence in space in the first place.

>>1775860

A space elevator wouldn't work on Venus. A city in the upper atmosphere would get blown around the planet once every 4 Earth days or so, so a cable stretching from the city to an orbit high enough to keep station with the city would be even longer than an Earth-based space elevator. Not even carbon nanotubes could manage that distance. The best bet would be to build some kind of orbital ring system, but with no moons around Venus to get raw materials from, it will have to wait until we can easily move a lot of stuff around the solar system.

>>1775857

A major problem with terraforming Venus is that it's day is a few hundred Earth days long. I think we should stay in the clouds until we can really speed the planet up.

>>1434280
>>1434283

This is one of the main problems I have with space elevators. The cable needs protection and other supporting structures along it's length, but it just can't cope with the extra load. Even theoreticaly perfect carbon nanotubes are barely strong enough to support their own weight to geostationary, let alone the weight of 22,000 km of stuff along it's length.

I honestly think an active structure like a launch loop or space fountain would be easier to deal with, in the long run.

Space elevators from Earth are a fucking pipe dream. It will be far easier to build launch loops, and use those to build layers of orbital rings or space fountains.

A space elevator from the Moon is also rubbish. Moon-synchronous is where the Earth is. Too fucking far. You should just build a big magnetic track on the Moon and launch shit in to space by running it down that. Far easier.

Mars is fine though. Same cable length as Earth, but it doesn't have to be as strong as Mars's gravity is weaker.

Stick with launch loops. Chances are we will never manage to get carbon nanotubes strong enough to hold the weight of the elevator, especially once you consider the fact the cable is going to need to be coated to protect it from the atmosphere/micrometeorites, which will add a lot to it's weight.

Perhaps you can build layers of orbital rings up to geostationary once you have an easy way into space, but a direct cable to geo is likely to always be unfeasible.

>>1013999

Probably still cheaper than the rocket launches it would replace.

And it doesn't have to be that. There's all kinds of different proposed methods of getting to space cheaply, although the launch loop is my personal favorite.

I quite like this kind as well, but it needs a crapload of material already in orbit to work.