Elevator to Space

Space Elevators, A Treatise:
THE INITIAL BEANSTALK

The very first Space Elevator will have to be mostly a very simple industrial grade device, consisting of a spool of carbon nano-tube fiber cable, and a winch system, (The first cable should be a hexagonal weave, allowing it to lay slightly more compactly on the drum than round braided or round twisted cables...a flat cable would have incessant feeding problems and perhaps require kinking or wasted space at the edges of the spool, to get continuous rolls on the same drum etc...)

There should also be an external thrusting ring, which will house an array of rocket style thrusters... this will be used to provide a counterbalancing/lifting effect replacing some of the mass needed to counterbalance the first cargo lifted, which should be an “umbilical”, or second larger cable in the shape of an un-equal hexagon, i.e. Three longer faces, and three shorter corners, providing space internally for a central tube, and three “hoses”... the shortened “corner faces” will be cogged, with a composite material allowing its use as a “reverse worm gear” for lifting a powered platform (I suggest the platform have twelve sides, the center hole in the platform will appear three sided, and if the overall structure is trussed, one flat will need to be left open.) this platform should use high voltage electric power from three conductor strips, perhaps with the corner cogs if their material is conductive... this would allow a very positive and safe lifting system of the outside platform, with micro-control of movement possible... I would use a long threaded worm and angle the cogs, allowing the use composites with the system, and resulting in long mating faces on the gearing and cogs, allowing lifting of heavier items with the available materials... and to allow high speed application of power with pure rotary movement...
FIRST UMBILICAL

After the first cable, one would lift a second heavier cable in the form of an umbilical, This first umbilical should have the three smaller internal “hoses” used to transport air, and natural gas etc... with the air and natural gas used in part, to power another thrust ring, as in the initial lifting “sky-hook”... but this thrusting ring would be powered by fuel etc., supplied from the ground, and therefor not have the limits of the initial skyhook which must thrust off of tanked fuel and oxygen... I would suspect that the umbilicals will have thrusters built into each stage, allowing each section to add to the lift as it is pulled up and out... perhaps a thrusting ring at intervals also, like beads on a string, the center tube should be as large of a diameter as possible, and it will be used as a pneumatic delivery device, i.e. Air pressure from the ground used to send up cargoes of structural materials for construction, people, or anything else that will fit in the Gondola... and the same tube can be used for lowering cargoes using air pressure as a braking device to eliminate the usual problems from high re-entry... And at least provisionally during the initial lift the center tube could be used for air and the three hoses for natural gas, And later changed when the thrusters are used mostly for maintaining positioning of the station during unusual load situations... I would also consider a study on the use of Helium balloons to help lift the bottom part of the cables during installation... It's some “free lunch” allowing numbers to be used elsewhere to better purposes...
FINAL UMBILICALS

This second stage Elevator or “Asensor”, will be used to lift the third stage, which should be a set of three much larger umbilical pairs, or six tubes in all... these should also be the same unequal hexagonal shape outside with the worm gear/acme thread like cog systems, conductors, and outside platform, ( which will be used mostly for outside maintenance of the umbilicals... Or for slower, over sized freight, such as modular sections...) With the pneumatic tubes being as large as possible to use with bigger payloads, any cargo that will fit inside the pneumatic Gondolas will travel the distance in a fraction of the time of any system using a “climber” on the cable in strip form... And carbon nano-tube fiber should make a fairly strong pressure tube, as well as being the support tie to earth... the design gets around many of problems of a vacuum ambient... How much pressure to stack air twice as high as the atmosphere? How much to push cargoes in a sealed tube, or a sealed against the tube gondola?

These three Umbilical pairs, will consist of an up and a down tube in each pair, Will be stationed in a hexagonal array on the ground, with shunt valving to allow down-coming cargo breaking pressure to be cycled into the lift tube, and so recycle the energy from the falling cargoes into the lifting side... Or pushed into storage for later use in lifting... this array on a hex, should allow the pairs to come together as one goes upward on the design from near horizontal in a gentle curve, into a parallel verticals configuration, with an aesthetic effect similar to Mr. Eiffle's tower... This would also allow passengers to seat themselves in the normal manner on the ground as the tubes would be near horizontal at a distance from the central datum point, and as the Gondola vehicle goes upward, the seating should gymbal slightly with compensators ( like automotive gas shocks) to allow the passengers to take the thrusts in a balanced reclining position,(balanced between thrust and gravity) rather than their knees in their chins...
TELESCOPING SECTIONS

These three tube pairs should have a telescoping section in their horizontal areas, to be used to move the station off its datum point one diameter plus, to dodge space junk, and also used in conjunction to allow “ducking” the station-head downwards slightly for the same purposes, and to allow any minor altitude adjustments or for using station mass as counterbalancing for various load levels in the tube cargoes... These same pneumatic tubes can be used to supply air to the station, and to ships, by them milking off some of the pressure between up and down sides of the pair systems... And really, I think we need to create some jobs cleaning up near-space of all the human and natural space litter...
TRIPLE REDUNDANCY

The reasons for the three tube pairs are to have triple redundancy, is to allow continued use during inside maintenance of one of the tube pairs, and to still have a spare pair if maintenance and accident combine to take out two pairs at the same time...and also for structural reasons of the whole design... allowing it to remain stationary in spite of winds etc.

A major downfall of the strip cable concept... It also allows the elevator to handle a lot of cargo, and its a big Universe, we might need the capacity...
GO VALVES

At the top, on each up-tube, should be a “go-valve” (GV's) that acts like a switch in a railroad yard, and allows cargoes and vehicles (Gondolas) to be either “siphoned” at the top, i.e. Be routed into the station and then back into the down tube, or to be ejected directly into space... this would allow split second routing decisions, and routing of individual payloads either into the station, or lets say; To scramble earth based “fightercraft” (space vehicles), launching much like paint balls full or semi-auto from a paintball gun... (very rapidly) which would make the guys in the Pentagon, very very happy... This system would allow ground based vehicles to be launched at a fraction of current costs...
AT THE BASE

At the base we will need a power supply, I recommend three or more Geo-thermal wells, running steam turbines, with direct drive to air turbines for the initial compression of the large volumes of air for the pneumatics, with said air pressure being stored in a array of sub-terrain air tanks tunneled as vertical shafts into the bedrock, and manifolded into a cross connected system, or an isolated system at will...

These geo-thermal wells and turbines can also be used to heat the “tanked” air slightly with the steam, through a heat exchanger, or the cooling loop on the steam cycle, etc., for de-icing both inside and outside of the umbilicals/ pneumatics... I also recommend that the tanks have dehumidifiers built into their bottoms that collect moisture and allow it to be blown out using the ambient tank pressure with simple pipe and valving... I also suggest that in normal mode the three redundancy zones be kept entirely isolated, with the air shunted outside its pair group only in emergencies... everything triple redundant and isolated as much as possible, especially electrically... ( One could also use a matching standard guage land based pneumatic tube system to get freight to the Pneumatic Asensor, allowing automatic routing etc., and an integrated system, planet and solar system wide with Pneumatic Asensors on other moons and planets... )
THE FLIGHT DECK AND CONTROL TOWER

The station should be built as a vertical cylinder overall, with a flight deck and control tower at its top, to handle mid sized in-coming and outgoing craft, I recommend the area be divided into at least three sectors, preferably 6 or more, or fields with the control tower being at the center, and a central cargo/ aircraft hangar decks elevator array built into the base of the tower, the reason for the flight deck arrangement, is simple human ergonomics, and the fact that it provides a familiar way for existing aircraft pilots to “come in for a landing” and for craft to be handled by familiar methods just as at commercial or military airstrips, or as on an Aircraft Carrier, this will also allow “stacking” incoming or approaching craft just as used at current airports... and allow current pilots and air traffic controllers, to retrain easily for the new ambient conditions... it also provides much parking area on the sides of the strips... it also keeps incoming ships at least trying to stay above the deck level... helping to prevent the Twin Towers effect... keep the higher velocity space craft up on the roof...
FIELDS OF FLIGHT

I suggest that the three (or more) flight deck sectors be elongated to cantilever outwards structurally from the station body proper, to allow longer landing strips for deck parking and for the occasional rookie a bit more leeway coming in... (even though it should feel more like coming in in a helicopter...) The sectors could have a dividing wire backstop for use as emergency arresting gear to catch disabled incoming craft, and the decks themselves should be either light guage steel plate, or a magnetic surface, allowing craft to anchor themselves with electro-magnetism etc., on contact... This section of the Pneumatic Asensor should rotate separately from the station proper, to allow the landing fields to be rotated in the proper direction for the apparent motion of the station, Facilitation, for landing craft, much like taking off and landing into the wind with aircraft... actually the whole station above the cargo lift decks could be rotated to produce pseudo-grav., and the winged landing strips would rotate with or without the upper section, and it is possible to use air cylinders like jacks to raise the landing strips at angles to launch on planned trajectories, and the system could be used to “process” more vehicle traffic like a Gatling gun... the bullets ( robotic cargo ships) could come in or go out, timed to the rotation and sweep angle of the wing-strips, and feed themselves into and out of the hopper much like a touch and go, with a cargo drop in the near center... Such a Rotary station with the pneumatic system would trans-ship a lot of cargo... and it could sling or AIR CATAPULT the empty lighters out on the far side of the rotation, or at any other vector, if speed was imperative, like say in an ammo handling situation...I would have a large diameter air stand pipe, as the center support of the control tower, and use it to trans-ship air to lunar colonies via large tanker ships... so imagine the flight deck being much like a flower, with its rotary petals, and then the Air Ships come in nose down at the center of the flower to fill up with “Honey” for the moon... I suspect the first Pneumatic Asensor will be the first “For all mankind” Military base in space...
THE STATION PROPER

The station itself should be built in a stacked manner, levels, with new construction being sandwiched between the upper and lower functioning end levels, i.e. Flight deck, and lift deck levels... Like adding a card to a deck of cards... I suggest that all couplings, air, water, electricity, wastes, etc, be built as modules with quick or easy disconnects, to allow adding in said sections, and to allow modules to be traded in and out for any reason...

Basically to add a new floor to the station, you install temporary jumpers on all the connections, jack the top and bottom apart, put in external structure and external bulkheads, and then pressure up, and be able to work inside early in the construction process...

New levels should be named as derivatives of the original levels, i.e. Level 21B, is level 21 original, and B means its the second addition...
COLOR SCHEME

The internal color scheme of the station needs be a color code for sectors, I recommend twelve sectors over all, with three primary colors separated by their various intermediary color shades, with the walls and ceilings being basic flat white with some of the appropriate color added to create a mild and pleasing pastel tone of the sector color, slightly tinting the background flat white paint, and all the trim darker, being the sector color also... this is to avoid confusion in emergency situations, perhaps a holing, fire, or other situation, anyone working anywhere can know their sector at a glance any direction, and go the direction correct for the emergency... so a holing could be announced by level and sector, and as long as the lights were on, personal navigation would be instant... Even for people who work all over the station... I also recommend a braille signing system at passage way intersections, using lighted raised dots or studs. Large and bold enough to be sensed through a space suit glove unlit, in the dark... this braille sign should be at face height on all four or more corners of the intersection, and provide sector and level location...
GEOPHYSICAL LOCATIONS

I think the first stations should be built less than ten degrees of latitude from the equator, for the obvious reasons, and also to be away from the hurricane storm tracks which begin at ten degrees or so... No twisters here... I recommend the first American station be built in southern Costa Rica, or northern Panama on the Cordilla Central, due to Geothermal potential ,and physical locations for shipping and land transportation access to the Americas... Also as climate change raises sea levels this area will become an island, (Panarica) with the lowlands of Panama, the canal etc., becoming a sea passage in the future, and I suspect the Lake Nicaragua/ Rio San Juan area will also be navigable to ships... Making it the cross roads of this side of the planet, and highly valuable strategically...
WIND AND OTHER EFFECTS

Do not ignore the wind factors, this will be the down fall of any strip built system, I recommend the engineers view the films of the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure, and think about the strip design, and wind speeds aloft, and the Harmonics of such a strip cable... it wont work guys... and you dont need it anyway... Ribbons flutter invariably in the wind, and I worry also about harmonics and de-Guassing... look at the cable this way, its a very long Violin string that will be stretched very tight and and have its sounding box in a vacuum, meaning the whole station would begin to vibrate and sing as wind and cargo conditions changed, with the cable feeding the sound energy into a vacuum insulated sonic battery... and if it was perhaps a harmonic of high-C etc., it would be hard on portlights, glasses and mugs in the galley and maybe even people's teeth... and has anyone experimented with pressurized sounding boxes in a vacuum and zero-G situations? I think I would want some sound dampening into the design, and maybe break up that 300km or more violin string into some sections that weren't flutter prone... say use tubes and triangulated CNTF cable trusses... it might “Hum” but it wouldn't be coherent sound... the effect of which, could also cause metal fatigue if not properly dealt with...

On de-Guassing etc., thats quite an antennae, 300km plus of carbon... and not a bad lightning rod... what kind of effects will one get from Solar wind, lightning, atmospheric charges, and static electricity, etc.? I.e. No shortage of experiments need to be done before guys with hardhats hook lines onto cargo...
HOME SWEET HOME...

I think the living quarters areas should be to the outside of the various levels, allowing people to have an external view, and external access to their private yachts... these sections could possibly be rotated to produce artificial gravity, meaning that the view port would be much like a glass bottomed boat, (in the floor of the living room?) and access (the front door) would be through the ceiling... (Or to a hall on the side. ) I very strongly suggest two things, one: that all dwellings have their own air tight integrity, and two: that they also have life boats... two airlocks minimum to a house, front and back doors, allowing private homes to be used as refuges in a holing situation...
AMPHORAS

The life boats should be simple devices, lets call them “Amphoras” after the Greek wine vessels, as they will be for our most valuable commodities, our families... I suggest they be much like thermos flasks, with a single opening at the top, double wall, and a vacuum between the walls, for insulation, and that area be filled with dust, as dust in a vacuum is a near perfect insulator... On the outside, I suggest the space shuttle tile material, but as a single casting, to eliminate the potentials we are so aware of...

(Any bureaucrat who even suggests the omission of these life boats, for any reason, should be given the “Titanic Award” and jettisoned into space, very naked, at first opportunity...)

The drag (drogue) Parachute system should be progressive, i.e. Consecutive chutes, all with a hole in their centers, to allow them to be packed around the access hatch like a dough nut... these chutes should be hooked together, “chained”, so that even if one fails to open, it's drag will still help deploy the next larger chute... these Amphoras should be slightly ballasted to float hatch up...

The Packed chutes should be protected thermally by a lip projecting upwards, like the rim on a beer can...With a heat shield ring-hatch over them to protect until at deploy altitudes...
I also think some retro or slowing energy could be provided by having a water jacket that heats up producing steam which is jetted out forward or downward, to turn re-entry heat build up, into braking and cooling... So basically all residences will have a hatch or two in the floor, leading to either an amphora, or the house outside airlock...or the family yacht?
PNEUMATIC LOGIC

The reasons for the Pneumatic systems are fairly obvious, low friction, very safe, and very rapid ascents and descents... also the factor of supplying air etc. to the station and ships in space... And the ability to use heavy land based power systems to provide the lift... Not to mention the recycling of energy between the cargoes going up and down... If the pumping/pressure systems are over-designed, the umbilicals or station, can take a minor holing, and perhaps still function in an emergency, providing more security than any other system... also if the power goes out, the down tubes can still be used in a passive mode to brake cargoes by nothing more complicated than a pressure relief valve at the bottom... Or could be used by people with very small diameter parachutes... And look at it this way, the entire atmosphere only weighs about fifteen pounds per square inch, and we commonly pump at pressures of thousands of p.s.i., leaving plenty of numbers for engineering acceleration etc. on such a design...Its also non-polluting if it leaks, and no shock hazard etc., to passengers... and if there is a failure in mid-lift, the capsule/container/Gondola in question can be caught by its air cushion and all passengers survive... internal maintenance can be done on the umbilicals using platforms that are open topped and lifted by said air pressure, and then locked into position with simple mechanical brakes to the inner wall of the umbilicals...Allowing re coating of the inner surface of the umbilicals, or patching any holes, etc... Also air as a medium of power weighs very little, and the boosting pressures should be fairly low... The effect of the air pressure over the square area of the gondola's base should allow impressive physics, much like hydraulics...and one could have the horizontal sections at the ground base be long enough for some pre-acceleration if necessary... and with crossovers, the suction behind downloads, could be used to lower pressure slightly, ahead of uploads if needed...

Not to mention the structural stiffening of the whole structure provided by the pressurized umbilicals... Its a system that allows excellent control, safety, and connections, to Mother Earth...

I would suggest a very light triangulated CNTF cable array between the umbilicals to tie it all together... and to dampen vibrations...

This design has potentials no strip cable system can ever match... make it repairable, make it efficient as a cargo handling device, make it an integrated system, With the ability to shift all ground based transport systems to compatible standard sized pneumatics, and eliminate our little oil problem, And all of us still have our personal cars and trucks, with a non-polluting replacement that can be powered by any ambient excess mechanical energy, like ocean waves, not to mention the geothermal power... And forget projected beam power systems, they are inherently dangerous, simple pressurized air is a safer replacement, and can be used in so many ways...its known and proven technology, with actual known numbers to the engineering... And unfortunately with the current beam energy idea, if your beam power is in the Laser or Microwave bands, a structure, or vehicle moved by the wind or an earth quake, would be difficult to target even from directly below, and if you get off the bull's eye with Laser or Microwave, it could hole your station, or fry some people... And the pneumatic system could also be used for energy transfer, using the Turbine pumps and then turbine/back to mechanical or electrical energy, even if it meant going continuous on air flow...And the tubes could be used to temporarily counter act an air loss situation in the station... Basically its a system by where the common family car would have a highway to the cities on the moon or Mars etc., either with a Ferry Ship, or as independent space vehicles. And its a simple solution to the fossil fuels problem... you can pump air pressure with windmills or wave action very easily, and its very “Home Boy Friendly Technology”, and can give all the guys working in their garages and basements something to sink their inventive teeth into... Using Air as an energy storage device is in some ways better than electricity, as it doesn't require anything too high tech and it wouldn't need batteries that are hard and slow to charge, and expensive to replace, And that create E-garbage, the system basically works by attempting the impossible instead: to wear out air molecules instead of wearing out batteries... It doesn't have to be too efficient, Free energy even at only 3% efficiency, is still free... And air will be the most important and “available” commodity in a space located culture...Very likely to end up as the base for a currency system; “Air credits”...

For here on Earth, it would function well as a secondary power grid, with lower pressure air being wind farmed etc., This solves a current problem of energy storage that is the hold up on new technologies...and say @ 100 psi, and it going to central stations to be used to run turbines that produce/pump air at much higher pressure for storage... this higher pressure air could then be used to regulate the system, or to go into independently “powered” (stored actually) vehicles... as a power grid , pneumatics has many positives... and houses could have air power turbines producing electricity etc...The system would also easily cross connect with the existing electrical grids via turbines running generators and electrical motors running pumping turbines, and higher pressure pumps, or perhaps a two way generator/motor/turbine? Combine this with underground high pressure storage...
SOME KITCHEN SCIENCE NUMBERS...

For example, imagine a tube say 6 feet in diameter, (I would want the tubes much larger than this.) area equals radius squared times pi, so 6 ft is 72 inches, divided by two gives a radius of 36 inches, squared, is 1296, X pi,gives 4069, plus a little behind the decimal point, Let's round to 4,000 square inches... now add just a measly 100 psig/or 115psi,to the equation, and and you are looking at 400,000 lbs of thrust at sea level...

Meaning you could get some serious velocity on something weighing a fraction of that and O-ringed inside a very very strong tube, if it was carbon nano fiber reinforced... 100psig? Not even a problem to produce, and if you can make a strap with the material, you can make a garden hose... Somebody needs to ring up Uniroyal, and maybe 3-M, and see if they are interested in building some 300km or so air hoses... So, what I am talking about, is the literal equivalent of a flexible tube paint ball gun, using air pressure to launch things, up a tube perhaps coated with Teflon, on the inside, that uses ambient Geo thermal energy to do it, and results in the solution on how to ventilate the station, feed air transfusions to ships, and if you used very large Dirigible type pressure tankers, could be used to ferry air to a lunar or a Mars colony, and return used air to the earth if you wanted or needed to, perhaps to remove the carbon to build more neat toys with... Or to use the planet Earth in part, as the moon's lungs... for that, I would want to maintain Earth with a very healthy set of lungs... and if you really really needed to get rid of a lot of Earth's Atmospheric co2 in a hurry, the system would work to blow atmospheric co2 into space if you could separate it from the other atmospheric gases...So basically booting up enough elevators, and connecting them to co2 extractors, preferably blowing almost pure carbon? would work to fix our big “boo-boo”... and who knows what one could use co2 for in space factories, or perhaps, growing algae on the moon... Overall, its a way to boot ourselves and our baggage into space very very cheaply, creating infinite wealth making potentials, and a lot of contracts and jobs... Its also a National and Planetary security issue...

Its the high ground... And the new dominate human culture, is who ever gets there first with the most... so if you guys on Wall street don't want to have to bother to learn Chinese, I suggest you invest strongly, and keep the Chinese studying English... The best investments will be in the Carbon Fiber, and Aluminum companies, and especially companies now involved in pneumatics... Later when asteroid mining begins, the types of metals used will shift... Any stock broker worth his salt will be into the long term investment potentials of such companies, they will gain more than Government bonds, or any “Earth limited” investments... This IS the future, invest heavily, and bring solutions and profits sooner...

The Whole idea is much like an air powered Super-Gun... less initial velocity and pressure, but a lot longer barrel, and you can use gravity balanced with air pressure to bring the loads to the top and stop them at the right floor... Or launch loads directly into space, having usable velocities for slow cargo to the moon...

Everybody wins...

And nobody has to die in wars to do it...

We could all co-operate and make it a reality very quickly, and do you suppose they would look pretty at night? all lit up with lights to warn aircraft, and and the lights at work stations etc., and an artist would want the tube to be transparent if possible, so as gondolas shot up it, the cabin lights would streak... very pretty... and give little brothers and sisters something to think about, when they watch their big brothers and sisters head off into space...

And then there would be the occasional use of the gas thrusters on the station... might be pretty to see those at night also, light up at hundreds of km. up...Future historians will say our explosion into space was limited by our excessive Earth based military expenditures, and our limited “small” populations, I think that we should start storing fetuses, instead of aborting them... in fact people should be paid for them... In the future they will be a cultural commodity: i.e. Those cultural groups wanting more inhabitants for colonies could “buy” the fetuses, and raise them as their own, be the culture and the fetus differing, it would only serve to eliminate racial bias etc., and eliminate inbreeding... This is THE major paradigm shift for humanity, from competition and war over territory, and resources, to competition in expansion...