SpaceElevator

Phase 2

This is stuff about the space elevator! Just type a URL in and it will create a page if it doesn't exist.

I set this up because I don't want to wait on installing a bunch of software on another domain, etc. If we don't have any pages here, there is no point in paying $20 / month for another domain yet...

Next Steps

SpaceElevatorNextSteps

Book Revision work

SpaceElevatorBookRevision

"Institute"

I believe we could have had driverless cars decades ago. I also believe we could have had a space elevator decades ago. You come to your own decision about how long it will take, but understand that the difference between 5 years and 20 years is big. I believe if I could wiggle my nose and put 1,000 people on it today. People will think you are crazy anyway, so why not give them something hopeful. You have many examples. Why is Boeing able to build a 787 in half the time of the 777? Ultimately you don't have to talk about time because you are simply talking about tasks, and they can go at whatever speed we decide. But you should provide hope.

- Agreed. It is just tasks. The timeline is determined by determination and will. This I have known for some time. The key is influencing the will of those needed.

You should also say that you are the only person who has a real Mars strategy. This would upset people if said directly but if we can demonstrate it then we might convince them. We have done a full up Moon development proposal that blows away everything else and Mars is no different.

Organizing real (not toys) research, revising, soliciting funds, investigating software, making a business plan for an institute or foundation, etc. ought to be things you work on.

Yep. I have gone through several exercises of listing development work and drilling down into the details of what is needed. The business plan is challenging - it hinges on a benefactor other than conventional investors or the government. We can discuss this more.

At the same time, think about what things this institute should do. You should use your brand to bring on people and money. People -> money and money -> people. However, if you are going to bring people on, you need to offer a bunch of things to do and a bunch of things to do them with.

If you can find little tasks for others to do for 5-10,000 then we can hire them. If you can get college kids to do things for free then even better.

You should network. Go to Intel.com and see what you can find. I can scour my network if you want, but I think you should make some "formletters" you send around. I'll bet you could have someone show you around a fab plant and hook you up with some employee who you could entice to help you. You should also be talking to the nanotube people at NASA. (Srivastava)

This I have gone through and I will show you my Space Orlando concept and the lists of tasks I have pulled together. Your suggestion of putting and maintaining a list of research out there is good - we should market it. We have half heartedly attempted it in the past.

I presume it will take a 1 billion dollar device to make nanotubes. It is the long pole, but you don't have the money and tools to attack it, except on a theoretical basis.

I will show you where we are on this - we are very close.

Let's not work on building toy climbers. Let's try to do real science and engineering. Let's write some software. Build a wiki to organize people. Boeing does their engineering on computer. How could you build a climber by computer? What about particle simulations? Did you check any of those things out?

There is a large set of complex interactions between components that we can implement. I have a large matrix of these interactions and if we could put them into a simulator it would help focus on critical components.

What about if you maintained a wiki of problems? You'd be surprised at how universities around the world would start attacking them. I see it in the free software world all the time. Some random free open source codebase has students working on it -- because it is better than starting from scratch.

What about a space elevator simulator? Only build something we can learn from and exposes problems, not something that is only marketing. It will become good at marketing if it becomes good at science -- you will have lots of complicated things to show. You could write code for fractional load packing analysis / simulation.

Art

I think that you should hire someone to create some 3-d models, in a free format, for others to check out. Do you know someone you could supervise? I'll pay for it by the hour.

http://sketchup.google.com/

This supports an open format known as collada, which means you can build something and use it in other places. You could build this using other software as well...

We will be using a video game engine that supports that format. I could get one of my programmers to throw that model into a world and have it move around.

You could build all the basic parts as a 3-d model, then get people improving on all of them in parallel. What really does a climber need to look like?

If you create a starting point, and list the next set of problems, people will jump in and help out. Your goal is to give a good starting point, and a good problem, to college kids.

And that is just one problem to attack. I haven't heard from you about the particle simulation but that is a whole nother way to go to attack certain problems. And I have other ideas as well...

Software gives you a concrete virtual world to work in :-) The simulation is as good as you want it to be.

Software

http://keithcu.com/wiki/index.php/Codebase_Analysis#Physics_Engines

Imagine you built a simulator so that when you added weight to the climber, the ribbon dimensions got bigger. I will figure out how to build that in a video game. If you create a spreadsheet which has the calculations, which boiled down to some simple formula, I could put that formula in. If someone improves the spreadsheet, they can put in a new formula.

Your math shouldn't just go into your book, it should go into spreadsheets you post on your wiki.

We will soon have running physics engines, graphics engines, etc. We could set you up with somethings you could play with, or supervise others on. If you can specify things, I can get them implemented.

P.S. Here is a list of people who will build models for sketchup. http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=c9bd5e6d5b511d0e6c58fbbbefee0599

P.P.S. I just found a few space elevator models: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q=space+elevator&btnG=Search&styp=m&reps=1