Re:Water Found Deep Inside the Moon
by lorenzhs on Friday August 25, 2017 @09:26AM
(#15098214)
A lunar space elevator is feasible with today's materials (just a whole lot of them, way too much for current technology to transport to the moon). Here's a nice talk by Markus Landgraf, a mission planner at ESA, at 33c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8407-an_elevator_to_the_moon_and...
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Water Found Deep Inside the Moon
by computerex on Monday August 28, 2017 @08:17AM
(#15116014)
It's not just about the tensile strength of the materials. The dynamics of a lunar elevator necessitates and extraordinary amount of weight to be used as a counterweight nevermind the length of the cables themselves.
Just because something ticks the checkbox of being theoretically possible doesn't mean it's practical or feasible to build.
Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have the means to build something on that scale. It still takes $10k to put 1kg in LEO, imagine the cost of transferring to the Lagrange points.
Sure, the amount of materials needed exceeds what current technology can get even into LEO by several orders of magnitude. Nobody's proposing to actually build a lunar space elevator. All I'm saying is that a super-advanced civilisation could theoretically build one from the materials available to us today, which is not true for a space elevator from the Earth's surface.