Over at the Space Review Sam Dinkin ask's whether a space elevator worth its weight in diamonds?
"Diamonds have a big advantage over carbon nanotubes. They are currently being produced in commercial quantities. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is being used to flood the jewelry market with extremely high quality diamonds at 10-30 percent below wholesale prices of natural diamonds. Substrates as wide as 15 centimeters have been reported as a base for diamond growth. That’s hundreds of times the area that’s needed for a space elevator cable."
Your thoughts?
Update: The link has been fixed, sorry about that.
It will be worth its weight in gold...if it can be built. ;-)
But if it was worth its weight in gold, would that encourage a new breed of "metal/mineral thieves?"
Compared to carbon NTs, diamond is much more brittle and does not have the elasticity to handle the forces required to sustain a 66,000 mile ribbon.
The current push toward large diamond substrates is just for use in semiconductors. For an SE we would want fibers instead. That would mitigate the brittleness problem. However, it would make welding difficult (many fibers to weld), and would not make it more elastic.
Is there a way to temper the carbon NT with another material to make it more durable. Or maybe super heat it and spin it more like a web then layer it for better flexibility. And what is the difference between the manufactured length, and the amount the metal will stretch in length under stress due to centrifugal force and different atmospheric changes at different altitudes. the ball on a ribbon explanation doesn't explain how the station will keep up with the planet when theres not enough momentum to keep them even when the station is in zero g. thats more like just trying to spin a ribbon with nothing on the end isn't. it sorry just being creative. it seems if you made it at a diagonal line it against the rotation of the earth. It would push or pull the station threw space more securely. it would be longer but sure but you would eliminate tons of distance lost to sway stress from where the base is planted. and it be more like an space escalator lol. thank you.
A carbon nanotube ribbon still means such a huge development effort, deployment costs, and vulnerability to failures that we may have to accept it is not the final solution.
But where material has insufficiencies they sometimes can be redeemed by pure energy. Perhaps it's not the ribbon itself that would carry the elevator, but an electromagnetic field conducted through a much lighter cable than we think of today.
Certainly it need a huge amount of energy, which possibly could be drawn from the sun, or from the earth magnetic field itself. Something like that :) or even something totally different.
Alternatives today may appear even today as much SciFi as the elevator was in 1960.
Perhaps we still lack the appropriate idea.