this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
144 points (99.3% liked)
Futurology
1784 readers
78 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have to suspect a lunar orbiter would be more practical for lunar base building and fueling further missions than a lunar space elevator, wouldn't you need angular momentum from rotation to keep it rigid?
its not really about being a better option as much as to see how it would be and work on the technolgy involved in making it happen. with the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere it should theoretically be a best case scenario and can be done without any super materials.
A Martian space elevator can be built with high tensile steel, and will be shorter than one on the moon. I like space elevators, but they work better on smaller bodies with higher rotation, i.e., low gravity and lower stationary orbits.
yeah but the moon is close and makes a faster easier testbed. I would actually like to have it followed up by a martian one.