Several years ago when I was invited to pitch stories for the Star Trek: S.C.E.<\/i> series, one of the ideas I tossed out was a story in which the crew of the USS da Vinci<\/i> have to repair a space elevator damaged during the Dominion War. Thus was Ring Around the Sky<\/i> born.<\/p>\n
The concept is simple — rather than use rockets to get into space, you build a solid structure into space, and you run it basically like an elevator, ferrying men and materiel to and from orbit. Building the elevator would be a massive investment of energy and resources, but that expenditure would be earned back by vastly reduced costs in putting payloads into orbit.<\/p>\n
I’d long been fascinated by space elevators. I’d first encountered the idea in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos<\/i> — a Jon Lomberg painting of a planet with a network of space elevators took my breath away when I was seven. Later, I read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator<\/i>, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise<\/i>, and Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds<\/i>. (Yes, I’m serious in counting Dahl’s book.)<\/p>\n
Inspired by all of this, I pitched Ring Around the Sky<\/i>.<\/p>\n
After the story came out, someone asked me — are space elevators really<\/i> feasible?<\/p>\n
Not only are they feasible, I said, but we’re probably only twenty or twenty-five years away from building one. Or at the very least, of having the manufacturing knowledge to build one.<\/p>\n
My reader didn’t believe me.<\/p>\n
Apparently, the Japanese are about to put my supposition to the test<\/a>.<\/p>\n Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those [engineering] issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (\u00a35 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In November, they’re convening an international conference on the topic.<\/p>\n Can the Japanese do it?<\/p>\n I’m just a layman, though I did a lot<\/i> of reading on the topic when writing Ring Around the Sky<\/i>. I stand by the thought that it can be done within the next twenty years.<\/p>\n I have no doubt that the Japanese can do it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several years ago when I was invited to pitch stories for the Star Trek: S.C.E. series, one of the ideas I tossed out was a story in which the crew of the USS da Vinci have to repair a space elevator damaged during the Dominion War. Thus was Ring Around the Sky born. The conceptContinue reading “On Japanese Space Elevators”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[376,4089],"class_list":["post-1974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","tag-ring-around-the-sky","tag-star-trek","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}