this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Futurology
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IF fully reusable spacecraft ever becomes reality, then a space elevator ON EARTH would probably never be needed.
On the moon, probably. On Mars, maybe. But Earth, a fully reusable rocket, combined with in space assembly just makes a lot more sense.
Especially long term when we actually start gathering raw materials in space. We'll eventually only need to send people , and complex things like microprocessors into space, and the rest can just be made up there.
Even reusable rockets use a tremendous amount of fuel. Falcon 9 burns 700,000 gallons per second.
Untrue, that's many times over the 25,000 gallons of kerosene they keep on board. That's still a lot of gas, but not 700,000 gallons, not by a long shot. If it burned that much per second it wouldn't even produce enough thrust to carry its own fuel payload
To inject a source, there's 395,700 kg total propellant on the first stage, and a burn time of 162 seconds. That gives about 2,442.6 kg/second, and assuming it's fuel balanced it comes out to something like 700 liters of RP-1 per second. Could OP have been using thousands of gallons instead, by accident?
It's still a lot, though, while a space elevator is just a really tall elevator, or alternatively an EV that goes up and down.
My bad for trusting Google top result.
395,700 kg fuel first stage. Burn time 162 seconds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#:~:text=The%20rocket%20has%20two%20stages,rocket%2C%20carrying%20143%20into%20orbit.
The 39,000 gallons of LOX in the Falcon 9 doesn't make itself.