High Quality, Low Cost Carbon Nanotubes now available

so it's not 750 tons... OK, forget what I said.

EDIT: except the part about the bullet proof t-shirts. It really seems to follow common sense and history that you will see small products commonly available out of a new material before you see unimaginably ginormous products made out of a new material.

It isn't just "my thing"--without the ride the payload is useless. If Griff wants private help--fine.

My goal was not to talk about HLLV as much as to get you to chill out in your smarmy attacks on whoa.

And Ekke--you are going to need an HLLV to lift the bloody space elevator cable, because it is heavy--thus the need for heavy lift there.

The Heavy Lift is required only for that deployment.

After the deployment Heavy Lifters as well as other lifters are required only when the Sapce Elevator can't manage all the traffic.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Check your dictionary, I think you mean "savage attacks". Your goals are clear enough.

DKH

No--I'm savage--not smarmy.

Well....maybe so

I appeciate more folks like Whoa chiming in.

Look--there are about five of us who post the most on this board. We have got to get some more fresh blood in here. This is starting to resemble a local talk-radio program (ugh) where they have the same handful of people calling in.

How are we going to get spaceflight privatized when we can't get as many different personalities on the X-Prize forum as there are in the Bad Astronomy forum? I think it might help us attract more folks if we were to not bite the heads off people like Whoa who are just trying to chip in.

Whoa/Matt reaped what he sowed. You don't see me hunting everybody down ... I wouldn't have time for anything interesting.

Things always quiet down between launches and most people probably think the xprize is over anyway. I don't think it's necessary to have some sort of critical mass of people to have reasonable discussion, two would be satisfactory in the right conditions.

We got lots of personalities here. Hell, people actually involved in building hardware post here on a semi-regular basis. You just have to be patient. This is privatised space technology, it's not a popularity contest.

DKH

It's not my fault that plastic hadn't been invented when you were a kid!

Well, it looks like this whole discussion might be moot. Over at www.liftport.com is a new thread about how carbon nanotubes might not be as strong as once thought.

http://www.liftport.com/forums/showthread.php?t=211

And now that poor child at the Mission Space ride. If that had been a roller-coaster, you wouldn't have heard as much about it. Now watch some smart mouth like Jon Stewart make a joke out of it.

Things have been slow. Right when you get your hopes up these kinds of stories pop up and pour cold water over everything.

Thanks for the link Jeff. It's a good example of how hard it is to predict the future utility of a supra-technology. The thread also highlights in stark relief that many advocates of future technologies find it hard to let go of something they strongly believe in. Particularly with the arrival of something they are poorly prepared to deal with. Evidence contrary to their beliefs.

DKH

Hey! I'm not THAT old. I had legos AND Tinkertoys. And Lincoln Logs and blocks and an erector set and a couple of other construction toys whose names I can't remember. But Tinkertoys beat them all! Anyway, now they have plastic Tinkertoys!

Sorry... Well, not really. I know it was cheap, but I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't gone for it.

Tinkertoys are alright, but Legos definitely take it for building model spaceships: at least ours had a solid hull.

I guess that means the image behind my posts is always wire frame.

Ooh, nice.

I was always one for viewing the world with a bit more advanced rendering capability, myself -- which is why I also built several finescale model airplanes and was continuously engrossed in a select few computer games.

I found myself building a lot of hybrid stuff when I was a kid, part Lego, part something else; a little of this and a little of that...

But I found that Tinkertoys were best suited for actual machines to store/transfer energy (the Legos were all prism shapes only in those days), so anything that was supposed to launch/move/animate under it's own power was usually gonna be Tinkertoy. Erector sets were cool for that kinda stuff, too, but I didn't have enough of that (Erector) to build complex devices.

...I understand that Tinkertoys are actually made of plastic these days?

I suppose it could be meaningful that the elevator thread has turned to the topic of toys...

Well, they do both have about the same level of usefulness for getting to space....