Geek Week - Can we build a lift into space? - James May's Q&A (Ep 33) - Head Squeeze

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1. this will never work because earth is flat
2. i'm pretty sure they've put a ban on space lifts on habited planets due to terrorists, accidents natural disaster risks.
3. just copy halo there is no bias from me I promise you
4. What if we used rockets as our counterweight
5. Nah anti-gravity is the way to go dude.
6. God didn't destroy the tower of Babel in a "fit of rage because it dared to reach heaven" it was because Nimrod had declared HIMSELF god and had gotten the rest of the people to believe in his daftness. Even his son later got in on it claiming to be the dead king...
7. Im just here because I miss Top Gear
8. There has to be some kind of decent intermediary technology. Maybe a better fuel, a reusable rocket like SpaceX is working on, or a different system altogether. I've seen demonstrations of a system that would use lasers from a satellite reflected off mirrors on the capsule to achieve combustion, and it looked promising. Perhaps with a sufficient power source, the vehicle could have its own lasers. Of course, that only works as far as there's air to burn, but it would get it going.
9. *Elevator
10. Given the proposed space elevator approach, with centrifugal force and gravitational force meeting an equilibrium, wouldn't attaching a payload to the space elevator and sending it up create an additional pulling force on the rope equal to the mass of the elevator and its contents? How would an elevator be able to reach orbital distance before having pulled the counterweight back toward the Earth far enough for the elevator to continue operation? Maybe I missed it, but I don't think that consideration was mentioned, and now I'm quite curious.
11. At 2.24 its wrong. If the man stepped off the tower without reaching horizontal orbital velocity he would fall directly down to earth again. It looks like James May does not understand orbital mechanics.
12. When in the UK did we start using Dollars James?
13. or a big balloon that gets up to height an than uses a rocket that gets it into space
14. how about using a rocket propelled gyroscope
15. Mister Slowly...
16. the future: the counter weight just pulls the world closer to the sun and entire planet turns into a mojave desert.
17. Another problem, surely, is that unless you can move the elevator, you can only put one satellite up.
18. It baffles me that most people seem to ignore the fact that geostationary orbits happen at approx. 3Km/second speed. Climbing (or descending) such a structure (even if it could be built) is no "trivial task". You still have to gain that orbital speed and it ain't free. Newton's laws still apply (ie: F=ma). So supposing such an elevator were built and the climb began, where would that force come from ? If viewed from the rotating earth/elevator's frame of reference, the climbing elevator would experience a HUGE Coriolis force "pulling" in the direction opposite the rotation, and this force would have to be "countered". Of course Coriolis is an "apparent force", and can be explained by plain inertia if the system is observed from an "outside" inetrtial frame of reference. But either way, the elevator still has to reach orbital speed, which is why "ordinary" rockets need so much fuel to begin with. It's not so much about the "hight".
19. Why don't we just perfect the railgun, make an extremely large and powerful one and launch shuttles in to Geostationary orbit and go from there.
20. Read Kenneth Oppel's 'Starclimber'!