flickering pictures

Space elevator: a proposed megastructure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space as a way of non-rocket spacelaunch.

Picture a super-strong ribbon thinner than a sheet of paper, one metre wide and long enough to wrap two and a half times around the world. Now picture it extending into space, the ribbon kept taut by a counterweight and the planet’s rotation — a lot like a child whirling a cosmic yo-yo over her head. Imagine elevator cars shuttling materials up its length and into space, at about two per cent of today’s costs, revolutionizing our ability to build in and travel through space.

The idea may seem the stuff of science fiction — and was indeed popularized in 1960 by Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise -– but it wouldn’t be the first novel concept to make the leap from science fiction to science fact. Submarines, credit cards, cell phones and magnetic railroads all started out in the sci-fi realm, and if scientists are right, the first space elevator may reach for the stars as early as 2031.

From the Times:

Unlike the warp drives in Star Trek, or H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the idea of the space elevator does not mess with the laws of science; it just presents a series of very, very complex engineering problems.

Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen [about $9.4 billion] on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.

According to Yoshio Aoki, a professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University and a director of the Japan Space Elevator Association, the cable would need to be about four times stronger than what is currently the strongest carbon nanotube fibre, or about 180 times stronger than steel. Pioneering work on carbon nanotubes in Cambridge has produced a strength improvement of about 100 times over the last five years.

It seems incredible, unlikely and super cool that for just $9.4 billion — or $1.5 billion less than Exxon Mobil’s profits from January to March this year — we could build a fixed link to outer space, an elevator to the stars. Imagine what this would do for the International Space Station, which is currently dependent on $450-million shuttle launches to supply it with food, spare parts and other necessities. Imagine what it would mean for human space exploration, and potentially for the establishment of permanent outposts on the moon and elsewhere, if we had a safe, cheap, non-weather-dependent method of ferrying cargo into space 24 hours a day. And imagine (or try not to) what might happen if a 36,000-kilometre-long elevator cable was somehow severed from its counterweight and came crashing down to Earth, whipping out like a great cosmic wet towel.

Story via Slashdot.
Artist’s conception via The Speculist.
Diagram via High T3ch.

• plug this post
  
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati