20 Time Independent Reflection

I chose this challenge kind of on a whim. I just wanted to get something that was what I was interested in, and I was really interested in the Kurzgesagt team at the time, which is a YouTube channel all about science. After looking through their videos I thought that a space elevator design would be a good way of designing something unique, which was required for this 20 time project. I, although regretting this later on, finally pulled through the complicated science and made success by the end, and it ended up being a good learning experience. My goal was to create a space elevator write-up on how it would be like in real life, then design a written version of one, then a real model. At first, I was really solely focused on getting it done, with a brief writeup from several small sources online, with a simple drawing, but when I saw how advanced the thing really was, I had to dig deeper, and I found, in the pit, a huge amount computation necessary to find all the dimensions, energy required, etc., which many of them were beyond my skill range. I ended up spending much of my time simply researching these things and the math behind them, so I could do the computations, then publish them on my paper. That ended up with what I had made, along with a more detailed drawing. However, when I tried to put together a model, I saw how inaccurate it was. Really, I couldn't model the climbing of a climber, so I would basically have to stick with a clay non-moving climber, with a piece of string attached to an also sessile "Earth", with another clay glob at the other end for a counterweight. Clearly, this wouldn't model the space elevator properly, and honestly, it would've been pointless. I would kinda declare this part as being the failure, albeit it was an important step to learning as well as the fact that it was just a misconception at the beginning about the de facto simplicity of building all of this. 

I learned a lot of physics related science, such as centripetal force, the ultimate tensile strength, tapering, and the Coriolis force. I also learned some of the formulas to find the calculations I needed to design a space elevator, although much of it was too complex, with calculus and things like that, so I relied on research online, and sometimes, my dad, since he is an engineer. 😜

I would say the next step would be to build a model or make a "vodcast" of space elevator. As I stated, the model I built was largely useless, so I had decided that a vodcast of the space elevator would be a better idea, and I could use the info I present so that more people will be educated about the facts of the space elevator, which could mean a sooner construction of a real one, if it really catches on with the public, and there is enough money to develop it.