It seems the Swedish Greens have been having themselves a few problems recently:
One Green politician refused to shake a female journalists hand. not because she was a journalist (you never know where one of *those* might have been) but because she was, y’know, a woman. And women carry Haram Cooties, I guess.
A Green Party housing minister was filmed comparing the Israelis to Nazis, because not letting the Palestinians into Israel is *exactly* like the Nazis incinerating millions of people. He also showed support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
A Green Party Deputy Prime Minister called the events of 9/11 “accidents” and had previously compared the recent “immigration crisis” to Auschwitz, because people drowning after sinking overloaded boats that they willingly boarded for the purpose of invading and colonizing another land and overturning their culture is *exactly* like people who got rounded up at gunpoint, loaded into boxcars and gassed.
The Green Party was a tool of the Soviets back in the day, aimed at overturning the west from within. The masters may have changed, but the core essence of the Green Party seems to remain.
Is it real, or is it Photoshop? Neither would especially surprise me. It would be best, though, to work under the assumption that a technology that the US figured out nearly *sixty* years ago might be achievable by lesser powers.
I’ve never really been much of a fan of the space elevator concept. Not so much that it relies upon nearly magical levels of structural strength (though some new materials are strong enough – at least at small scale – to make the concept feasible), but because it is something of a snail for getting payloads into orbit. If your elevator can climb at a brisk 100 km/hour, and that would be a massive challenge, it will take the elevator about 358 hours to climb to geosynchronous… slightly over two weeks. That’s a couple days in the van Allen belts, so your elevator had better be highly shielded… which means the ratio of payload to climber will be minimal. And then your climber has to either be jettisoned, or it has to make the climb all the way back down. That will be probably several days, during which time you can’t send another climber back up. So you’re probably looking at a turnaround time of around three weeks per “flight.”
Turnaround time can be improved by not going all the way to GEO. Instead, go several thousand miles up, then throw the payload overboard. The higher up you go, the more tangential velocity you’ve have, and the closer to a circular orbit you’ll have. To get into an actual circular orbit, you’ll need to have an onboard propulsion system; the lower your ejection altitude, the more propulsive capability you’ll need. But while this’d speed up the elevator system, it’ll reduce effective payload by *a* *lot.*
Jettisoning a payload puts it into an elliptical orbit with the jettison point being apogee. Perigee rises as the elevator rises; at some point you’ll have an orbit where the perigee is something convenient like 400 km. So all you’ll need is enough propulsive capability to circularize at perigee. But since I can’t be bothered to do the actual math, it seems to me the apogee altitude will be quite high for the elevator, so it might only shave a relatively small fraction off the elevator trip time compared to going all the way to GEO.
Then there’s the problem of actually climbing. How? The cable might be a flat ribbon, millimeters thick by centimeters wide, or it might be actually cable-shaped. But the materials under consideration, graphene and diamond fiber and such, have a little problem: they are virtually frictionless. Run wheels on them all you like, you probably won’t get much traction. Adding a ribbed surface for traction, or adding magnetic materials so a maglev system can haul up the elevator, will add vast amounts of weight to the system.
This video points out some of the engineering issues with the concept:
I don’t care what anyone say… “Independence Day: Resurgence” looks like a bucket of fun.
Will it be great science fiction? Almost certainly not. Will the technology and the physics make a lick of sense? Almost certainly not? Brent Spiner and Jeff Goldblum? Yup.
