Beanstalk

At the night of the 28th of December of 2024, I was at Starbucks café, here on Lulu Island. Peter the redhead linguistics guru and I greeted each other "Happy New Year!" At home, cousin Eve's cousin Rex was relaxing in front of the kitchen television with Eve and Mama. Rex is visiting from the states. I offered them some shrimp crackers, which Rex gifted me earlier. In the fridge, Mama has a big load of lotus leaf-wrapped meat-stuffed sticky rice packs from their outing today. I was playing with Grok AI: I was thinking that AI could write me a story about Jack and the Beanstalk in Tagalog or Esperanto. A person named Jack is the cousin of Eve and Rex. He lives in the Philippines. On the kitchen television at home was showing a renowned Filipina singer singing before she had a sex-change operation to become a man. I told Rex that I read about such operations in the Biomedical Library in my university, UBC.

Today, the 18th of February of 2025, I ate two sandwiches on separate walking trips to Tim Hortons café: In the late morning, I ate a Roast Beef Craveable sandwich, then in the afternoon, a Crispy Chicken Craveable sandwich. It was a grey-clad sky. I usually have a small Earl Grey tea with oat milk. At home, as a break from my studies of Chabacano, Philippine Creole Spanish, I read for practice some stories aloud in "real" Spanish, of speculative fiction. Spanish has lots of available literature. Meanwhile, Chabacano itself needs more written literature, I opine: On the Web, all I could find that were substantial models were religious magazines from Jehovah's Witnesses, even though my spiritual inclination is towards Science, Buddhism, and Animism. Oh, well! The next day, I would discover that Grok AI could write stories in Chabacano! The AI would manufacture stories about Jack and the Beanstalk, and as well as about Count Dracula and his red horse carriage, all in Chabacano.

If we don't build a Beanstalk, somebody else will—and once one is working, the number of rocket launches will drop to zero. That's the source of more than half our income.

I have never liked riding the Beanstalk. My distaste was full-blown even before the disaster to the Quito Skyhook. A cable that goes up into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic.

Space elevators proposed for the Earth require novel high-strength materials and a substantial counterweight for their implementation. The problem becomes easier for Mars. There is no available "counterweight" for a synchronous "beanstalk" but Phobos proves a substantial anchor in non-synchronous orbit. A tether extending 1456 km from Phobos could release objects into an orbit just entering the Martian atmosphere, providing a launch and recovery device for Mars Excursion Modules. Extending the "beanstalk" to a length of 5832 km would place the end at the fringes of the Martian atmosphere.