this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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I know it kind of sounds silly, but this is some of the very first infrastructure on The Moon, and that's pretty cool.
The Moon will likely be our main port for travel within our solar system - if we made a lunar space elevator we would use it as our launch point without having to expend so much fuel launching from Earth like we do with traditional rockets.
The moon rotates too slowly (about once every 30 days), you don't want a space elevator for the moon, the tether would have to be ridiculously long.
But there's no atmosphere, so you have another good option: a linear accelerator, or mass driver. Basically you make a very long, very straight rail and use magnetism to accelerate a craft right up to orbital velocity. The only complicated part is constructing 50 km of rail, but I mean, it's more time consuming than complicated. This is actually way more feasible than a space elevator.
You still need to fire an engine on the far side of your orbit though which makes it more difficult as it still needs to be able to propel itself (while surviving the acceleration)
Wut? Impracticality aside, could they build such a "ridiculously long tether"? What's they make it of? Musk farts? Can't wait for him to bankrupt the u.s. and build a space elevator that breaks and shatters, ruining astronomy and prospects of drone explorations of Mars
Uh, well truth be told, you could probably use steel cable or carbon fiber for a lunar space elevator cable, but you would need some really insane quantities... Like I said, I wouldn't recommend it, just go the mass driver route instead.
But why are you even bringing up Musk? Nobody is suggesting involving him...
Space elevator breaking would be pretty catastrophic for a lot of earth when that shit falls.
Nah, it wouldn't do much damage. The tether's whole job is to be strong, but light. And being a long, thin fiber, it'll have a pretty low mass to surface area ratio (high drag in atmo). If it did come down, it would likely mostly burn up, or mostly be slowed down by the atmosphere.
Additionally, the length of tether with the most tension on it will be the section nearest to the ground. If the tether snaps near the ground, the whole thing gets hauled up to orbit for good.
To be clear, I'm actually not in favor of space elevators in general, I think there are many much more practical ways to get to orbit. I'm just saying that a broken tether should not be the end of the world.
If you really want to build something like a space elevator though, you should check out the tethered ring concept: https://youtu.be/8B2iqiKehyM?si=9IM8FU-uI7CIoPtX
A station and then a mine would imo make more sense for a first.
People really not feeling this in the current climate for sure
...but you have to get whatever it is you're transporting to the moon first
As the saying goes, "orbit is halfway to anywhere."
Getting into and out of gravity wells takes far more fuel than moving between planetary bodies. A space elevator that can take cargo from lunar orbit to the surface and back removes one difficulty, while being slightly less sci-fi-ish than a terrestrial elevator.
We build the thing on the moon itself
Sure, it's mostly barren rock, but it still got useful stuff there, like for example water (hydrogen and oxygen, rocket fuel), carbon and oxygen in the rocks (methane, also rocket fuel), metals (building rockets), and various other elements
From what I've read we know, it's relatively poor in nitrogen and carbon, so the moon is not as useful as it could have been, but water is really all you need. If you can produce fuel and rocket parts on the moon, it's about as useful as it can be for space exploration and development
Since, remember, the alternative is getting those resources either from the surface of the earth (expensive in terms of fuel, and requires powerful rockets, aka bigger ships, also expensive), or from some place further out like the asteroid belt (time consuming). Gravity on the moon is much much smaller, so even if we don't have a space elevator, it would be far cheaper to use the moon as a starting point, or at least as a refueling point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources?wprov=sfla1
They addressed that in their post already.