To the Stars

Today's run I intentionally dedicated to thinking about getting off this planet. Shuttles and rocket fuel are nice and pretty but they are hardly efficient. Consuming massive quantities of fuel and releasing huge quantities of exhaust, each launch it's own trial to say that achieving earth orbit could be stream lined a bit is something of an understatement. So I have taken it upon myself to devise a better way, or at least consider alternate ways it might be done.

So first I started off with the idea as it was presented to me in science fiction. An impossibly long metal cable of indeterminate width that stretched from planet surface to orbit. Along this cable I understood there to be a car shaped like a donut wrapped around the cable riding up it by some sort of magnetic propulsion.

With this start I promptly dismissed the cable idea as not feasible. The weight of the cable of structure at that height/length I felt wouldn't have the tensile strength to keep itself together. Like a mooring line stretched between two oil tankers the line snaps before it becomes perfectly taut because its own weight causes sag.

From there I started thinking in the direction of Ender's Game. What if there were a way to reflect gravity? Well, this makes no real sense whatsoever, but lets play with the idea for a bit.

Saying we could reflect gravity would mean we took the gravity from one place and applied it to another area. So this would mean we could maybe make an area of earth have zero gravity while some other part of it experienced double gravity or something.

In this fanciful universe then achieving orbit would be pretty simple. You'd just have to push off the ground with a fair amount of force and before you know it you'd be in orbit. But let us discard this gravity reflection to pursue gravity to its roots.

For a while I was thinking along the lines of a gravitational tractor to get something into orbit. This will quite clearly not work at all, but it is an avenue I pursued briefly. The root of the problem it lead me to was gravity. Now, perhaps discoveries have been made about gravity since my astronomy text book was written but from what I understand gravity isn't all that well understood.

Gravity simply is the force that all matter exerts attracting other matter. Being fundamental the how and why of gravity is unknown or at least unknown to me. Thus the more matter the greater gravity, which means I can figure out how to increase gravity at a certain launch spot, a mascon, but not decrease it.

However at the heart of all this is one basic material. Matter. What if there was something which didn't abide by these laws of matter and gravity? Something like antimatter.

Now my understanding of antimatter is that I do not understand it at all. Whispers and rumors of something I yet to grasp in any meaningful way. Yet, for the purposes of this discussion let us say it is out there. In my understanding of the stuff antimatter and matter have absolutely no interaction. As in interaction is exactly equal to zero. The leap of faith that I made was to consider the possiblity that this understanding was flawed. What if the interaction between matter and antimatter wasn't zero, just really, really, really small? If the interaction were small then we are in business, just gotta figure out a way to harness the antimatter to our ends and whisto presto we have not only orbit but we have a limitless free energy source.

When I say a small interaction above I do not mean small as in the chances of antimatter and matter interacting is 1/10^X, where X is just shy of infinity. That is no good. What I mean by small interaction is that the two interact all the time but exert an incredibly weak, here-to-for undetected amount of force on one another.

At this point, having decided antimatter was the key, I returned to scoff at the idea I started with of using a very large , very long cable. Then I paused and thought, what the hell, I've got a couple more miles left to go in this run so why not see if I can make it work.

So, we start with a long cable, which likely isn't a cable so much as a tower of some sort. Assuming it can keep it's integrity, how do you keep the damn thing up? Well, the earth is spinning right, so centrifugal motion should rule the day here, all you need to do is attach a weight to the end of it, that'll keep it taut. Alright, tether an asteroid to the end of it.

We're probably going to have to have rocket engines at strategic points on the asteroid so that you can keep a constant orbit that is just right. You are also going to have to keep it well outside its roche limit as you don't want the thing falling apart on you.

The problems with the concept are several but interesting to contemplate and listed here in no particular order.

First while we have assumed the tower will be able to keep it's structural integrity against it's own weight and gravity what about meteorological forces like a strong breeze?

Second essentially adding a long string with a weight on the end to a spinning ball is going to do rather interesting things to that balls rotation and orbit. A possible solution to this problem is build two launch sites at exactly opposite sides of the planet. This will negate or mostly negate the orbit altering effects of the weight, etc.

Third, it occured to me that this tower, which I assume to be metal or metalic would almost certainly have a faint but constant stream of electricity going through it from ground to sky for the same reason lightning occurs. Which posses fascinating images of a land surrounding the launch site which became suddenly devoid of ever having lightning, because the energy simply rode up the man made tower.

Alright, that does it for this installment.