for space trash being tracked: no it is not. they keep finding more and more pieces, and since a screw going fast enough can destroy a satellite, i think you get the picture.
and the levels are increasing.
NASA. Besides, technically a fleck of paint is enough to damage a sattelite. However, a spaceelevator is a serveral cm thick rope made from nanocarbontubes, possibly in an iron alloy. It can whistand a bit more punishment, and even if it should be severed, there's a good chance it can be recovered before it comes crashing down(Though, really it'll just burn up harmlessly).
Effeciency losses do add up though. Also, I made some calculations once for orbital power plants, and they don't ever come out energy efficient. Not with current technology. You'd need hyperefficient pannels (60% or more), hyperlightweight pannels, and hyperefficient transmission. Remember that the transmission calls for 1km diameter recievers.
I'd be interested to see your math.
Well, let's see. Normal solar pannels weight 20 kg per kilowatt production. Expected lifetime is less than a decade. As such, a 4 GigaWatt station would weight 80.000 metric tonnes. Just solar pannels alone, no supporting structure or anything at all. Assuming we can dump that in LEo, which we can't, and we do it with cheapest, most efficient heavy load rocket (Falcon Heavy (in development) at the moment). We still need at least 1509 rockets. Each costing 125 million dollars. Coming up at 188.625 billion dollars total. (Launchcost of panels only) While that's not energy efficiency; I think I made my point.
Actually, probably not.
-Energy produced: 4GW*85%(transmission losses)* 10 years = 1072224 terrajoules
-Energy used: Is hard to find, because I only get thrust, not joules. So let's just go for economical viability then. Energy cost about 40 euro per Megawatt hour. Meaning that your solar pannel nets you 1191,360 million dollars
Well, all that water has to be put in orbit.
You don't understand how much water this is. Since we've been talking about mile-wide station, let us imagine one 1km across, in a ribbon 50 m wide and 5 m high. That's around 3 km of circumpherence, 150 000 sq. m of surface. If you want to have a 5m wall of water all around, you'd need twice that plus some stuff for the 6 m of wall, so around 2*150000*5+2*5*3000*5=1.650.000 cubic meters of water. That's 1.650.000 tons you have to pu in orbit. And why on earth would you need over 1.5 billion liters of water?
You're taking me far too seriously.
...And that number might not be too crazy. Two sources I found suggested water useage of ~60 gallons per person or ~400 gallons per family. Assuming a family of 2 parents and 2 children (to account for households with more children and fewer parents), a very rough but conservative answer of 75 gallons per person per day. That's around 300 liters. Assuming that half of the water is not used for everyday household purposes, and that the water recycling techniques can only recycle 1/10 of the total water supply per day, that's 6,000 liters or so needed in storage per person, so it would...um...never mind. I'm too proud of this math to discard it, darn it!
Modern day Recycling systems have 99% efficiency.
As for cosmic rays. They're (mostly) composed of very high energy particles. And
Of primary cosmic rays, about 99% are the nuclei (stripped of their electron shells) of well-known atoms, and about 1% are solitary electrons (similar to beta particles). Of the nuclei, about 90% are simple protons, i. e. hydrogen nuclei; 9% are helium nuclei or alpha particles, and 1% are the nuclei of heavier elements
All these are sharged particles. Meaning that you can use a magnetic shield to deflect them.
Still need to worry about X-rays and gamma rays and stuff though.
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Topic: Humans, and eventually a colony on Mars. (Read 66284 times)