An inflatable space tower tall enough to launch spacecraft
has been proposed by Brendan Quine, Raj Seth and George Zhu at York University
in Toronto, Canada, according to a New Scientist report. If the tower is built
on a suitable mountain peak it could reach an altitude of about 20 kilometers.
"The team envisages assembling the structure from a
series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made
rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium," New
Scientist reported in a June 9 story. "To test the idea, they built a 7-meter
scale model made up of six modules. Each module was built out of three
laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimeters in diameter, mounted around circular
spacers and inflated with air."
A full-scale structure would require gyroscopes and active
stabilization systems in each module to withstand the vagaries of wind at
different altitudes. The team created a computer model of a 15-kilometer tower
made up of 100 modules. Each of the modules were approximately 150 meters tall
and 230 meters in diameter; they were built from inflatable tubes 2 meters
across. Quine estimates it would weigh about 800,000 tons when pressurized.
Although the team has a very striking idea, science fiction
fans may find it familiar.
Fans of science fiction writer David
Brin may recall the towering "Needles" from his 1980 novel Sundiver.
"...the few times he had left Earth before, rising and
returning by balloon, there have been the other ships to watch, bright and busy
as they floated up to Power Station or back down the pressurized interior of
one of the Needles.
"Neither of the great Needles had ever been boring. The
thin ceramic walls that held the twenty-mile towers at sea-level pressures had
been painted with gigantic murals -- huge swooping birds and pseudo science-fiction
space battles copied from twenty-century magazines. It had never been
claustrophobic."
(Read more about Brin's Needle Space Towers)
Readers should note that the idea submitted by Quine, Seth
and Zhu is different from the idea of a space elevator,
with a terminus on Earth at one end and in geostationary orbit. Although the
space elevator concept was first suggested in 1895 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky,
many of us remember the minutely detailed description in Arthur C. Clarke's
1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise.
Via New Scientist.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with
permission of Technovelgy.com)
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