h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The current thread on the Space Elevator and a couple of the comments on the link - put it at a Lagrange point - tweaked my imagination...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4799369.ece

Would anyone care to comment?

eg:
Getting it there would presumably be (only) another order of complexity over putting it up in the first place?
And, , picking your time may mean you could raise/lower payloads without expending much energy at all. ?

Lagrange, not Le...

A1904249 Space Elevator
A947333 Lagrange Points

The whole point of the Space Elevator is that you put it at a geostationary point, a point which does not move with respect to the ground. The Lagrange Points are stable in that things in them will not fall down, but they're not geostationary, so you couldn't run an elevator up to them.

Yep, Gnomon - I did say 'tweaked my imagination' and '.

I was, perhaps, hoping for a light-hearted po session - for instance the relative order of complexity - or putting one on the far side of the moon, or even sun...

Which could be instructive in itself. But not here, perhaps.

You could build a huge rail which went the whole way around the earth, and tether the end of the elevator to it on a sliding mechanism.

Someone suggested once that you could build a space elevator on Mars. One of the problems woucl be that one of the moons of Mars is closer to the planet than the geostationary point, so you'd have to move the elevator out of the way every 8 hours to let the moon go past. The proposed method was to oscillate the elevator like a plucked guitar string, with the vibrations timed so that the string was always to one side as the moon went past.

A rail, eh? Then attach a bicycle dynamo to it.

I didn't know that a Mars moon is that close.
Come to think of it, (generation again) put up half a dozen, twang 'em & take a feed off, powered by the solar wind.

... a Solarolian harp

Gnomon wasn't that how the elevator/artificial satellite in the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy worked. The satellite was an asteroid moved into position as well wasn't it.

The vibrating Mars elevator was in Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Fountains of Paradise" from 1979.

Kim Stanley Robinson had a similar elevator fall down in "Red Mars" from 1992.

Zube

anyone read the nights dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton

that has an excellent description of a space elevator