getting to space is hard right now it's like going up a mountain on a year cycle with a
backpack full of explosives incredibly slow you can't transport a lot of stuff and you
might die a rocket needs to reach a velocity of about 40 000 kilometers an hour to escape from
Earth to get to that speed Rockets are mostly containers for fuel with a tiny tip of payload
this is bad if you want to go to other planets because you need a lot of heavy stuff if you want
to survive and maybe even come back so is there a way to get a space with less Fuel and more payload
a nice thing that solved most of our transport problems on Earth is what you call infrastructure
whether it's roads for cars ports for ships or rails for trains we've made it easier to get to
places it's a joke okay the same solution to space travel space infrastructure will
make getting into orbit and Out To The Moon Mars and Beyond easier and cheaper
great but what exactly is space infrastructure unlike an Earth space elevator which is currently
science fiction there is a simple yet promising technology that does not require there are some
people trying to come up with ways of doing the space elevator with a Twist I mean actually I
think this is what this video is about so that's the cable I thought he was I wasn't sure if he was
meaning uh one of those things in orbit that spin like this and you launch stuff up and it gets like
jolted and boosted I thought that's what this was about but this actually is looks like it's about
the stuff I was about to bring up that dangle from space and you you sit it you park it in a place
where it doesn't move from and a cable and then so you have to get to the cable which is not too high
up and then you you know pull yourself up Vader which is currently science fiction there is you
can also dangle it from the moon yeah promising technology that does not require new science magic
materials or huge Investments and that has been tested successfully in orbit already a cable and a
weight known as a tether the concept is so simple it's surprising what if we put tethers hundreds
or thousands of kilometers long into space and had spacecraft use them as ladders to climb to higher
altitudes and gain speed this concept is known as the Skyhook it works even better if we make
it spin the counterweight holds okay so I'm just out of date with this stuff but the other versions
I've seen you could literally dangle at nearly almost to the ground the long Cable in place
while it rotates around a circle a rotating tether slows down its tip relative to the ground at the
bottom and speeds it up at the top like a catapult this means that you can transfer energy from the
tether and get a massive boost when released so this is just fundamentally different to the cable
I'm talking about the cable you know be dangled down and so you hook onto it and it would be like
an elevator and then you get pulled up whereas this one is clearly more of a boost you know to
get out more or less for free equal to twice the tether's rotation velocity the specialized fibers
already exist that can survive the extraordinary stresses a sky hook would be faced with graphene
to protect against cuts and collisions from debris and meteorites we can thread our tether into a web
of redundant fibers since our sky hook would pass over the same spot many times a day this would
allow small reusable shuttles to catch up with it of course it's not that easy at its lowest point
the tether's tip is dashing through the atmosphere at around 12 000 kilometers per hour because of
Earth's atmosphere we can't lower the sky hook too much or it will get too hot from Air friction
so it will dip to a height of eight you could if the material was very thin and stuff like
this and that's why some I've put forward the idea of this uh very thin stuff made out
of graphene or you only need like you know an atom thick and an elephant could balance on it
on a pin and it wouldn't break or some [ __ ] like that 80 to 150 kilometers and no lower
to match this we'll need specialized spacecraft that can get to the tether while this isn't
exactly easy it's still much cheaper than getting a big Tin Can filled with rocket fuel to go 40
000 kilometers an hour so much easier and so much cheaper catching the tip will be a challenge too
there's only a short time window of 60 to 90 seconds to find a tiny thing in the sky moving
at mark 12. to make this easier the tip could have a sort of fishing line a kilometer long
with a navigation drone that helps the spacecraft connect another challenge is keeping our Skyhawk
in orbit as more and more ships latch onto it and pull themselves up they use up the momentum
that keeps it in place if we don't do anything it will slow down and crash into the atmosphere
and here we can cheat the universe a bit the Skyhook is a battery that's why you dangle it
from the moon we have orbital energy it's possible to balance the payloads coming in and being set
off arriving ships bringing humans and materials home to Earth add energy to the tether which
it can give to other ships departing into space this way the tether doesn't lose any energy the
more genius or we use it the cheaper it gets if we're still losing energy with each boost we can
recover it with small electric or chemical engines that regularly correct the tether's position the
set of tethers one around Earth and one around Mars could make trips between the planets fast
straightforward and low cost compared to Rockets the Earth tether would sit in low earth orbit to
grab people and payloads and fling them off to Mars the Mars tether catches them and slows them
down for a landing on the surface brilliant we should do this and we're just going to
pause here so I can tell you guys to come check out my new kind of VPN or Post Corner VPN and
you should come get it the beta is out now so come get it and help us colonize Venus one day
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now capture decrypt later is going to be a big problem hackers could be stealing data right
now and you could decrypt it at these later times but anyway let's get back to the video
in the opposite direction the tether could pick up a vehicle traveling through Mars's thin atmosphere
at only about 1 000 kilometers an hour not much faster than our airliners on Earth and fling it
back to Earth to be caught and lowered down the tethers could shorten trips they wouldn't be too
bad Ponyboy I don't think between both planets from nine months down to five or even three and
reduced people definitely have calculated these things reduce the scale of the Rockets required
by between 84 and 96 percent even better people may be able to travel in relative luxury as we
could afford to invest in passenger Comfort tether travel would be first class seats to Mars together
tethers around Earth and Mars could provide the rapid and cost-efficient transportation
backbone that would make space travel affordable but let's go further this is such a good video
no I'm not convinced new king Mars will terraform it it could but we don't know if nuking is going
to restart the magnetic field you know we think Earth's magnetic field is coming from the fact
there's all this charged metal flowing around in the cause around the corn stuff and that's
generating a magnetic field around the planet we think right and so with Mars which is a smaller
Planet it doesn't have a magnetic field and so we think maybe the core is stopped or something
to do with the core and the core is a little bit different you know just nuking this place
might not actually help generating the magnetic field which you kind of need if you want to have
you know a sustainable atmosphere and things like this the science just isn't there so you
know it maybe it's worth a try but then again I kind of want to see what's under the ground
of Mars as well you know that could be ancient life and things like that we'd destroy if we
just nuked it starting from low Mars orbit a tether could boost ships to the asteroid
belt the first craft sent to a new asteroid would need Rockets to slow did you guys see NASA just
planned a trip to a quadrillion dollar asteroid asteroid worth more than the global economy
uh 10 quadrillion dollars holy Dooley was set to launch in August 2022 we'll arrive the asteroid
in 2026 however the software issues they should have got calvpn they got hacked I'm just kidding
problems that meant the mission missed its window an internal country continuation termination
review so when is it re-planned no earlier than October 2023 that's exciting it's destination
subsequent arrivals might find a tether waiting to catch them and send them back for free
getting to asteroids cheaply is a major factor in opening up the resources of the solar system
precious metals and valuable minerals could be delivered to Mars Just weeks after they were cut
out of their asteroid they would be the perfect building plot for our interplanetary civilization
but why stop here Mars moons are very convenient no other moons in the solar system orbit that
close to their planet Phobos is so heavy that we don't need to worry about slowing it down
making it the perfect attachment point for super tethers just under 6 000 kilometers long the lower
tip would fly just over the surface of Mars and be very easy to catch the upper tip can fling
ships all the way to Jupiter and Saturn the same super tether can also bring the inner solar system
closer Venus and Mercury are a single swing away unlike Mars they're bursting with solar energy and
are rich in minerals in the long term Nothing is Stopping Humanity from constructing a zero
propellant transport Network for the terrestrial planets centered on the Martian moons tethers are
a comparably cheap and sustainable solution to making space travel affordable and the rest of
the solar system accessible for exploitation and exploration considering that we have the
technology to build them today there's really no good excuse to wait any longer parts of the
solar system are far away but they could be very close maybe I should dedicate some
time to trying to create a company and we're trying to create a Skyhook that could be fun
because like you just said there's no reason we couldn't build one right now no one seems to be
trying to because everyone's just concerned with making businesses that make money right maybe I
can put a proposal to try and get some funding to uh you know suggest we'll make it to these
quadrillion dollar asteroids and we'll bring you back the dollars just let us make our damn Skyhook
that could actually be a really good idea you know that's kind of what Elon has tried to do with
um SpaceX obviously there's more problems than just creating the Skyhawk you'd have to
how do you get the material you have to create one at asteroid um you get bugger all of YouTube
um but it actually could be worthwhile for a future thing and you know them
working in conjunction with SpaceX might sound crazy and far off but I wouldn't be
surprised if a company like that pops up relatively soon speaking of stuff
that's hard to reach but doesn't well that's that video I love cozy socks videos amazing