[Bobboau]

lets talk about this, I like the idea

Going Up
Soon some country or corporation is going to build a ribbon up to the sky. Then the question of who owns the moon or Mars will be answered
By Brad Lemley
Photography by Dan Winters
DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 07 | July 2004 | Astronomy & Physics
 

The key to conquering the solar system is inside a black plastic briefcase on Brad Edwards’s desk. Without ceremony, he pops open the case to reveal it: a piece of black ribbon about a foot long and a half-inch wide, stretched across a steel frame.

Huh? No glowing infinite-energy orb, no antigravity disk, just a hunk of tape with black fibers. “This came off a five-kilometer-long spool,” says Edwards, tapping it with his index finger. “The technology is moving along quickly.”

The ribbon is a piece of carbon-nanotube composite. In as little as 15 years, Edwards says, a version that’s three feet wide and thinner than the page you are reading could be anchored to a platform 1,200 miles off the coast of Ecuador and stretch upward 62,000 miles into deep space, kept taut by the centripetal force provided by Earth’s rotation. The expensive, dangerous business of rocketing people and cargo into space would become obsolete as elevators climb the ribbon and hoist occupants to any height they fancy: low, for space tourism; geosynchronous, for communications satellites; or high, where Earth’s rotation would help fling spacecraft to the moon, Mars, or beyond. Edwards contends that a space elevator could drop payload costs to $100 a pound versus the space shuttle’s $10,000. And it would cost as little as $6 billion to build—less than half what Boston spent on the Big Dig highway project.

Science fiction writers, beginning with Arthur C. Clarke in his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, and a few engineers have kicked around fantastic notions of a space elevator for years. But Edwards’s proposal—laid out in a two-year $500,000 study funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts—strikes those familiar with it as surprisingly practical. “Brad really put the pieces together,” says Patricia Russell, associate director of the institute. “Everyone is intrigued. He brought it into the realm of reality.”

“It’s the most detailed proposal I have seen so far. I was delighted with the simplicity of it,” says David Smitherman, technical manager of the advanced projects office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “A lot of us feel that it’s worth pursuing.”

Still, there’s many a slip between speculative space proposals and the messy real world. The space shuttle, to name one example, was originally projected to cost $5.5 million per launch; the actual cost is more than 70 times as much. The International Space Station’s cost may turn out to be 10 times its original $8 billion estimate. While NASA takes the space elevator seriously, the idea is officially just one of dozens of advanced concepts jostling for tight funding, and it was conspicuously absent from President Bush’s January 14 address, in which he laid out plans for returning to the moon by 2020, followed by a manned mission to Mars.

So the United States does not appear to be in a mad rush to build an elevator to heaven anytime soon. On the other hand, for reasons Edwards makes abundantly clear, the United States cannot afford to dither around for decades with his proposal. “The first entity to build a space elevator will own space,” he says. And after several hours spent listening to Edwards explain just how and why that is so, one comes away persuaded that he is probably right.

The office of the world’s leading space elevator designer is across the street from the Foxx Pawn Shop in the somewhat frayed downtown of Fairmont, West Virginia. The little mining community of 19,000—hit hard by the 1990 Clean Air Act, which made the local sulfurous coal a tough sell—aims to become a high-tech hub, helped by lashings of funds from Congressman Alan Mollohan, a ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee. Edwards is director of research for the Institute for Scientific Research, a four-year-old technology development house headquartered here in a new, cool, rather spartan office building. The space elevator is the most prominent of a dozen projects on the institute’s agenda.

Edwards is not the first to contemplate a great structure rising from Earth’s equator, flinging payloads into space like David’s sling. That distinction probably goes to Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1895 imagined a tower so tall that when an elevator occupant reached 22,000 miles, gravity “would be completely annihilated, and then it would again be detected . . . but its direction would be reversed, so that a person would have his head turned towards the earth.” Throughout the 20th century, the visions came thick and fast, replete with fanciful names: Skyhook, Heavenly Ladder, Beanstalk, Orbital Tower, even Cosmic Funicular. But every serious study concluded that the elevator’s track could not be built, because no known material was strong enough to support itself, much less legions of freight-hauling elevators, over such a yawning expanse.

Then in 1991, while studying the unique atomic structures called buckyballs, which are created by electrically charging carbon soot, Sumio Iijima of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, discovered the first nanotubes—fantastically strong cylindrical carbon-atom constructions less than two nanometers wide and of varying lengths. If such nanotubes could be chained together with no loss of strength, a piece as thin as sewing thread could lift a large automobile.

During the 1990s, several scientists speculated that a space elevator ribbon could be made from nanotubes, but “it was just an idea mentioned in passing,” says Edwards. Then came a day in 1998 when Edwards chanced to read a interview with a scientist—he does not recall the name—who declared that the space elevator would be completed in “300 years to never.”

 “Yet he didn’t give any reasons why it couldn’t be done,” says Edwards. “That got me going.” A wunderkind of astronautical engineering during his 11 years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Edwards led the development of the world’s first optical cryocooler, a breakthrough device that achieved supercold temperatures with no moving parts (“It breaks two, if not all three, laws of thermodynamics,” he says), and designed missions to the moon and Jupiter’s moon Europa. Intense and energetic, he used to hang glide for fun and wanted to be an astronaut. NASA rejected him because he has asthma. “I’m not timid. My feeling is, you can do a nine-to-five job, or you can take on something larger. At 29, I designed a lunar mission to map out all the elements and look for water. This seemed like a natural progression.”

In 1999 Edwards published a paper on the space elevator in the journal Astronautica, then spent two years writing a detailed plan for NASA. The plan calls for using a deployment booster assembled in low Earth orbit to carry two spools of 5- to 10-inch-wide pilot ribbon into geosynchronous orbit, 22,000 miles above the equator. The ribbons will unwind down toward Earth as the spools simultaneously ascend to 62,000 miles into space, always keeping the center of the ribbons’ mass near the geosynchronous point. The dangling ends of the ribbons will be anchored to a platform similar to an offshore oil rig in the Pacific Ocean. From there, an unmanned device called a climber, equipped with traction treads, will “zip” the ribbons together as it is powered heavenward by lasers focused on solar cells.

Then 229 more climbers will follow, adding more nanofiber-composite filaments until, after two years, the ribbon reaches a width of roughly three feet. All 230 climbers will cluster under the deployment booster to serve as a permanent counterweight. The completed ribbon and counterweight can support a steady stream of climbers, each capable of hoisting 13 tons of cargo and/or people at 125 miles per hour and reaching geosynchronous orbit in seven days. In the early stages, ascended climbers can be put into parking orbits. As more ribbons are constructed and operating costs drop, the climbers can be rounded up and brought back down.

Several ribbons in full-scale operation will open the heavens for solar satellites that can beam power back to Earth, large-scale zero-gravity manufacturing, space tourism, better global environmental monitoring, orbiting observatories, removal of man-made debris from Earth orbit, asteroid mining, and Mars-colonizing ships filled with hundreds of people. “The space elevator could be a catalytic step in our history,” Edwards wrote in his 2002 book (coauthored with Eric Westling), The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System.

The plan is slowly building an audience of fans. Since he joined the Institute for Scientific Research last year, Edwards has been spending a good deal of his time flying around the world, laying out the blueprint to scientific groups in presentations that take up to five hours. “I go to a place like the Center for Astrophysics, and the room is packed because people have been saying, ‘Let’s go heckle this guy about the space elevator,’” he says with a grin. “They say to me, ‘You didn’t think about this. You forgot about that,’ and I say, ‘Yes, we covered that,’ and I show them. At the end, they come up, give me their cards, and ask if they can help.”

Edwards will need all the assistance he can get. The very first step—making the ribbon—still strikes some as too difficult. “I was overcome by the giggle factor,” says Rodney Andrews, associate director in carbon materials at the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research, as he recalls talking to Edwards two years ago. The physicist had called Andrews about the nanotubes he makes in his lab. “I drive Brad nuts, because he wants me to say we can do this. What I will say is that it’s an interesting project, and there is nothing yet that says you can’t do it.”

Andrews’s skepticism stems not from doubts about the nanotubes themselves—they are more than strong enough for a space elevator—but from the difficulty of embedding them in high concentrations in a material like polypropylene. The little sample in Edwards’s briefcase came from Andrews’s lab. It’s just 1 percent nanotubes; the rest is a polymer matrix. The stresses on the space elevator’s ribbon will require it to consist of 50 percent nanotubes. To get to that point, Andrews says, the nanotube-matrix bond has to improve. “The question is, can we make a system where the nanotube is chemically bonded to the matrix?” To this, he can only say, “Lots of people are working on it.”

Assuming this large problem is solved, many only slightly smaller ones wait their turn. “The one people bring up most often is debris,” says Edwards. Since the dawn of the space age in the late 1950s, low Earth orbit has become a junkyard, with about 110,000 hunks of old spacecraft one half inch or larger hurtling at speeds as high as 30,000 miles per hour. Pieces moving 20 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet would damage even the space elevator’s superstrong fibers. Edwards’s response: Make the ribbon’s base mobile so that it can dodge the biggest pieces that NASA tracks (a 30- to 60-foot movement would be needed every six days); make the ribbon wider in low Earth orbit, where debris is most plentiful; and regularly patch small gashes.

Other concerns include the viability of laser-powered climbers. In Edwards’s scenario, ground-based solid-state lasers would beam at photovoltaic cells on the climbers’ undersides. Edwards says each 20-ton climber will require 2.4 megawatts of power, roughly the amount needed to power 650 U.S. homes. Is it possible to beam that much power with current technology? At least one expert is optimistic. “Yes, absolutely,” says Neville Marzwell, advanced concepts and technology innovation manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He points out that the space-based defense investments of the Reagan years led to huge advancements in laser development and that “the technology has made quantum jumps in the last 20 years.” He says ground-based tests have shown it is possible to beam “five times as much power as the space elevator would need.”

One by one, Edwards continues to bat away objections. Corrosion from atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere can be forestalled with a coating of gold or platinum a few microns thick in the danger zone. Hurricanes can be thwarted by making the ribbon’s face narrower (and increasing its thickness) for the first five miles. Terrorists are a concern, but the anchor station in the equatorial Pacific would be remote, with “no way to sneak up on it,” he says. “It would be protected like any other valuable piece of property, in this case probably by the U.S. military.”

What if the thing should snap and fall? Most of it would stay in space or burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, says Edwards, adding that because the ribbon would weigh just 26 pounds per mile, any pieces that fell to Earth would have “about the same terminal velocity as that of an open newspaper page falling.” And would it really cost just $6 billion? “The technical cost is $6 billion,” he says. “That’s different from full program cost. It could easily be twice that, even three or four times that when you get into political issues.” Still, compared with recent estimates for a rocket mission to Mars, which run as high as $1 trillion, even $24 billion for a space elevator looks cheap.

If the elevator works, it means nothing less than a revolution in human destiny. Humans have lived at the bottom of a gravity well for millennia; a space elevator would be a rope dangling into that well. Many people would clamber out. Some, eventually thousands or even millions, would never go back.

In Edwards’s vision, the first project undertaken by a completed space elevator should be building more elevators. While he estimates that constructing the first one would be a six-year $6 billion task, the second could cost as little as $2 billion and take just seven months because it could employ the first to boost construction materials into space. The requisite time and money would shrink for each subsequent elevator, and payload size could increase dramatically. Edwards’s long-term plan calls for climbers on the third and fourth elevators, each hoisting 140 tons.

He says that’s why NASA needs to get serious now: “The guy who builds the first one can have several built before anybody else can build a second one. Now the first guy has so much capacity, his payload price is down to zero. He can run the other guy out of business. Talk about grabbing the brass ring.”

And Edwards emphasizes that the United States is by no means fated to win this race. The first builder might not even be a government. “We have actually been told by private investors, ‘If you can reduce the risk and prove it can be done, getting $10 billion is nothing.’” Having an international consortium of public and private entities pitch in may be the best scenario for ensuring the common good. A world blessed with a half-dozen space elevators constructed cooperatively, radiating from the equator like lotus petals, could provide near-universal access to space at a payload cost of as little as $10 a pound.

In the long run, “you wouldn’t want the elevator only on Earth. A similar system would work on Mars or some other planetary body,” says NASA’s David Smitherman. Indeed, says Edwards, any large object in the solar system that spins could become a candidate for a space elevator.

But for now, Edwards remains focused on getting the first one built. Along with all the other boons it would deliver to humankind, the elevator also has the potential to realize Edwards’s personal dream of voyaging into space. “In 20 years, I’ll be 60. I should still be plenty healthy enough to go on the space elevator. Maybe it will turn out that the only way I can get into space is to build the way to get there myself.”

I tryed copying that as best I could, if I screwed somethng up forgive me (and point it out)

I say the biggest weakness to be resolved is the "stuff hitting it" problem, I don't like at all the idea of moveing the 62 thousand mile long ribon to avoid getting hit by a peice of old solar cell or glove or ect.

[Corhellion]

what about the old "string through clay" thing? if they fooked up (and I mean REALLY fooked up), they could cleave the earth in two...sort of...

But...it does make you wonder...it could make orbital shipyards a reality someday...

[Ace]

Yeah Bobboau, it's a good idea minus the space junk issues. I agree that the idea of a moving oil platform is pretty clumsy and something more... elegant would be better

[neo_hermes]

we should get rid of the space junk first then construct the Space elevator....or build the space elevator and have a planetary garbage servicce....

if you wish to go into space and reap the benefits of salvaging satelites in perfect condition plz communicate to this e-mail address.... [email protected]
brought to you by NeoHermes inc
-the e-mail address you see may/may not be real and any communication with it will be your fault and your fault alone...ty.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Corhellion
what about the old "string through clay" thing? if they fooked up (and I mean REALLY fooked up), they could cleave the earth in two...sort of...

I REALLY doubt it
It would just never fall fast enough.

[J3Vr6]

I read about this about a year ago, and I'm still eager about it as I was then.

[Rictor]

I have the same complaints as I did the last time we discussed this, which are:

1. When billions of people are without food, water, medicine and shelter, why the hell is this a priority, considering how much it will cost?

2. Who will own the space elevator? If it is owned by any one group, which is likely to be either the US, a multinational corporation (or several), or a few key governments, then that group could exploit the elevator to gain dominance over space. The US government is very keen on the idea of dominating space, and if not done correctly, this could give it to them (same goes for any other government). The militarization of space is a bad idea.

[Col. Fishguts]

Originally posted by Rictor
I have the same complaints as I did the last time we discussed this, which are:

1. When billions of people are without food, water, medicine and shelter, why the hell is this a priority, considering how much it will cost?

2. Who will own the space elevator? If it is owned by any one group, which is likely to be either the US, a multinational corporation (or several), or a few key governments, then that group could exploit the elevator to gain dominance over space. The US government is very keen on the idea of dominating space, and if not done correctly, this could give it to them (same goes for any other government). The militarization of space is a bad idea.

1. Compared to the military budget of most countries, it's rather cheap, especially considering the potential benefits of a working space elevator.
So, we better start saving money in the weapons department.

2. Multination space agency program (NASA, ESA, Russian space agency, and others), like the ISS.
No one owns it alone, independent of any militay organisation.

[delta_7890]

Originally posted by Rictor
I have the same complaints as I did the last time we discussed this, which are:

1. When billions of people are without food, water, medicine and shelter, why the hell is this a priority, considering how much it will cost?

Perhaps I'm just being cynical, but there will *always* be a sizable amount of people without food, water, medicine, and shelter.  There always has been, and there always will.  It's a terrible thing, but to impede the progress of mankind because of it wouldn't be any better.

[Rictor]

I'm sorry, but thats a very stupid thing to say. There is no reason at all why proplr have to die of hunger, exposure etc. Its just a matter of distributiing the wealth so that, before someone spends 10 billion dollars to build a nuclear submarine, we worry about the poor shmucks without clean drinking water first.

If people thought like you, we still be riding around on horses, using candles for light, going to the outhouse to take a crap, no internal combustion engine, no silicon revolution etc.

"Of course we have to have oil lamps, what other way is there?"

[neo_hermes]

i gave my money to unicef let them worry about it...and after that i could care less...

...i'd rather have the same arrangement like the ISS where not just one country controls the supposed building....

[Bobboau]

what..? the hell?


there are people starveing over there, don't waist your time makeing an internal combustion engine, or a light bulb, spend all your time feeding the people who are incapable of feeding themselves.

how is it people like HIM that impede prgress?

look, this could bring about the era of massive orbital farms capabele of feeding the world, wouldn't that be nice?

and militarizeation of space is so inevatable it practicaly a given.

[diamondgeezer]

Rictor, would you consider selling your computer or your car and giving the resulting money to charity?

[Bobboau]

yeah, how much have you given to poor needy people in the last, oh, six months?

[Styxx]

Originally posted by Rictor
I'm sorry, but thats a very stupid thing to say. There is no reason at all why proplr have to die of hunger, exposure etc. Its just a matter of distributiing the wealth so that, before someone spends 10 billion dollars to build a nuclear submarine, we worry about the poor shmucks without clean drinking water first.

If people thought like you, we still be riding around on horses, using candles for light, going to the outhouse to take a crap, no internal combustion engine, no silicon revolution etc.

"Of course we have to have oil lamps, what other way is there?"

Actually, it's more or less the opposite - if people gave their money to feed the hungry instead of driving technology forward, we'd still be in the stone age, because no matter what, you'll always have people starving.

[Bobboau]

that's what I said

[Liberator]

Originally posted by Col. Fishguts
2. Multination space agency program (NASA, ESA, Russian space agency, and others), like the ISS.

Yes, let's bring up the ISS which is way overbudget, poorly designed  and falling apart mostly because it is a multinational project with no set monitoring organization in control of quality of manufacture.

[Rictor]

Well, since everyone seems so adamant on the point, would someone care to explain why there must always be people starving to death, why the problem is in insurmountable one?

In the past 6 months, I have given exatly $0.00 to charity. I think I donated some old clothes to a charity like 10 years ago, oh and once I gave a homeless person my french fries.

You seem to mistake me for the US government, or any other government for that matter. I don't believe in activism, its more or less a wasted effort if you ask me. Unless I can convince a hell of a lot of other people to give to charity blabla, whats the point. Put simple, I don't have the capability to affect real change, not in current situtation. Where as most first world governments, and the big corporations, have enough resources to actually do something, to help someone.

This may sound like dodging responibility, but look at the situation realistically. Lets say I got a job, worked like mad and lived in poverty. I could at most be saving something like 5,000 a month, probably less. Thats 60,000 a year. Now compare that with...lets say the US military budget, which has, AFAIK, exceeded $400 billion for 2003. And this is not counting in the various secret and guaranteed projects, which do not appear on the official budget. Notice a bit of a discrepancy?

Every single person in Canada would have to donate around 12,000 every year, to rival the above stated budget.

Everyone is all nice and happy when were talking about Iraq or whatever, something thats making all the headlines and you get the grisly pictures, and more importantly, its a specific case. But once a concept, such as ending the suffering of...oh lets say 3-4 billion people, more than half the Earth's population, who are living well below what is considered to be the poverty line, most of them way below, suddenly people get all defensive.

Have I said anything shocking? I am against people starving to death, dying of easily preventable dieseses, drinking filthy, polluted water and so on. Does that make me a bad guy?

Do any of you think you should be congratulated for being born into relative wealth? Am I to be credited for this? I had the good fortune to be born in what was at the time a more or less prosperous country. As a result of this, I got to eat every day and drink clean water and go to the doctor to get my shots. If my mother and father had been Libyan (or whatever), I would have been so fortunate, through no fault of my own.

[diamondgeezer]

That's not even a good attempt at an excuse. Do you not have over there the ads saying 'give five dollars a month to this or that charity and you can buy clean water for this wide-eyed child'? Granted it'd be nice to spend less on weapons of war and more on helping people, but if you're not going to do anything to help other people than you shouldbn't be preaching.

Now me, I get angry when the government spends millions on stupid bull**** like the Millenium Dome when there's people sleeping rough in London. Or this Olympic bid - part of the funding would have to go to hiring hit-squads to clean up the homeless so as not to offend the international community.

But scientific research, this kind of break-through **** that will revolutionise humanity and maybe provide a grasp at a golden future, we should ignore that? Not only is your idea daft, but you're in no position to be on your orange crate here, me laddio. Like I said, if you value charity over technology, sell your computer. Get a few hundred in cash and go donate it to a homeless shelter or african famine relief thingy. That money'd make a huge difference in someone's life

[Col. Fishguts]

Originally posted by Liberator


Yes, let's bring up the ISS which is way overbudget, poorly designed  and falling apart mostly because it is a multinational project with no set monitoring organization in control of quality of manufacture.

The original layout for the ISS was really good and well thought through. But due to recent cut-downs in the budget, the project had to repeatedly scaled down, so in its current state is pretty much useless.

Now...which government has stripped down the budget for its space agency massively ?
Yup, the same monkeys-on-space-crack that recently announced they want to suddenly increase the budget again, return to the moon pretty soon, go to Mars...blabla (insert other stuff that sounds good in an election year)

..instead of properly finnish ISS first