Space Elevator Part 1: Burn Baby Burn

One of the largest hurdles in any technological advancement is the provision of power. As new technology comes out, it must overcome the transport and size of power. Space travel is no exception to this dilemma. Any self-propelled vessel must contain something internal to provide force. The success of any space program has hinged upon the ability to make the power-to-weight ratio as large as possible. If this ratio may be limited, then the ship will have an easier time lifting itself from earth's orbit.

Let's look at a simple example:
A ship weighs 50000 kg, and carries  500 kg of gasoline.
Burning gasoline provides about 50Mj/kg, so burning all of this fuel will provide about 25,000 Mega-Joules of energy.
Now, since we cannot burn all of this at once (lest one wishes to explode), so lets burn all of this over a rate of about a minute. So now we get a rate around 500MJ every second. This still sounds like a lot of energy!

But the force of gravity alone on our rocket ship is about 500000 Newtons. This means simply to negate our gravity , it would take about 500000 Joules, or about .5 MJ. This is not very much at all! We have 1000 of those! But force is an acceleration, so it takes more than that to overcome inertia. Lifting this machine will take much more than the amount of prescribed gasoline.

Just doing some approximations, we can expend about 45MJ a second towards lifting the craft up and out of the atmosphere. which thus would exert about

Gas is really heavy, so people have used plenty of alternative fuel sources, and compressed forms of certain elements burn with incredible energy and can do all of the heavy lifting, but they overlook something else entirely: why must the world burn?

That method of chemical energy transmission means carrying your own fuel source, which can be impractical. People have proposed many mechanical solutions, such as catapults and slingshots, but one theoretical marvel stands out in my imagination: the space elevator.

The basic premise of this apparatus would be an object that had one mechanical point in space, and one which reached to the ground. This seems simple enough, but the feat of engineering which comes with it would involve some intensive structural and materials engineering. All of which will be looked at in the riveting part two of this blog post!