Reply To: I need to know what to do
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Jolly RogerContinued…
…. the Space Fountain … can literally be built from the ground up. The ground station and the deflector station … would both be fully constructed on the ground, and the station placed on top of the ground station with their accelerators aligned. Then [as] the fountain is powered up slowly, the force of the pellet stream eventually lifts the station… The process can be suspended at any altitude … indefinitely, allowing for calibrations, maintenance, new construction, and so on.
If the support streams are sufficiently over-powered … the fountain can also be used to support … elevators or walls along its length… electromagnetic accelerators/decelerators can be built vertically along the stream as the fountain is slowly built up, drawing upon the force of the pellets passing through magnetic fields for support. [As] the wall sections (and any internal structure they themselves may support) are held aloft by the internal stream passing through them, they are under no extraordinary structural stress…
Thus Space Fountains can be used to create truly gigantic structures and towers as well as used merely to hold a space station aloft. And, unlike a Space Elevator, it would not require any extraordinarily expensive materials to hold together; modern-day alloys and composite materials would do just nicely.
The most obvious use for such a super-high structure would of course be as an orbital launch tower; line the outer walls with electromagnetic accelerators and shoot a payload up the side. A fountain tower about 40 kilometers high would be sufficient to launch passenger-carrying vessels to orbit…
A fountain tower could also be used as a super-sized arcology, research facility, industrial center, or more as a fountain 100 kilometers high and 100 meters wide at its base would have about 7.85 … cubic kilometers of volume…
Space Fountains would … have to be demonstrated on a “small” scale, first used in building kilometer-high transceiver towers and such for radio and television broadcasts. The technology can then be scaled up to support super-highrises, and then finally a true Space Fountain…
Though their initial construction costs may seem exorbitant, [Space Fountains] will quickly pay for themselves not just by making orbital travel cheaper and easier but by making space-based economies truly viable for the first time in history. They are just too good an investment for future generations to ignore.
But … within our lifetimes … [because of] long-standing conservatism …. exotic concepts such as the elevator and fountain could prove to be a very hard sell.
However … the advantages may be well worth the investment. After all, just as many who saw the first steam engines never thought they would transform a continent, so too are most people today unaware that the opening of the solar system to mankind is just a single railroad track away.
A “small”, relatively inexpensive, 40 kilometer Space Fountain could be built with existing materials and technology. Its power requirements could be supplied by Focus Fusion reactors. Their helium ion exhaust may even provide the “pellets” required to keep the tower aloft.
One possible site for this Space Fountain would be the Oklahoma Spaceport (formerly the Clinton-Sherman Airpark) near Burns Flat [there’s a mental picture! 😉 ], Oklahoma. It is located central to the contiguous United States and North America, and has much of the infrastructure needed for a space facility.
This could really open up space in a big way.