To help humanity explore the universe and spread to the stars, we first need to escape the gravity well of planet Earth. The only way to do that right now is to ride a rocket – which takes an enormous amount of energy and money, especially if you want to send anything bigger than a mobile phone into orbit. Rockets are useless for the kind of offworld commuter solution we’ll need if we’re going to become an interplanetary civilization – let alone an interstellar one. That’s why an international team of scientists and investors are working on building a space elevator. Using very little energy, these 62,000-mile-high elevators could carry travelers out of the gravity well and up to a spaceship dock.
If you want a glimpse of tomorrow’s morning commute, you need to know about the space elevator.
What is a space elevator?
A space elevator is a fairly simple concept. It would be made of an ultra-strong metal ribbon that stretches from a mobile base in the ocean at the Earth’s equator, up thousands of miles into space, attaching at its other end to an “anchor” in geostationary orbit. Robotic climbers rush up the ribbons, pulling cars full of their cargo – human or otherwise.
Because the space elevator pulls cargo out of our gravity well, rather than pushing it using combustion, it would save a lot of energy and be capable of bringing far more materials offworld quickly. It would also be sustainable, making one or more runs per day. That it’s reusable already makes it many thousands of times cheaper than the one-time-use Soyuz rockets that bring supplies to the International Space Station, only to destroy themselves in Earth’s atmosphere.
Why will it save energy and money?
NASA says that each Space Shuttle launch runs about $450 million. A lot of that money goes to fuel, and to storing enough of it to make the whole trip up and back down to Earth. But a space elevator won’t need rocket fuel.
According to How Stuff Works:
The lifter will be powered by a free-electron laser system located on or near the anchor station. The laser will beam 2.4 megawatts of energy to photovoltaic cells, perhaps made of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) attached to the lifter, which will then convert that energy to electricity to be used by conventional, niobium-magnet DC electric motors.
What it be made of?
The biggest question about space elevators is how we’ll make that 62,000-mile-long ribbon stretching between Earth and a counterweight. The short answer is: A substance that doesn’t exist yet, but which we’re very close to creating in many labs devoted to nanoscale engineering and materials science. Essentially we need a way of knitting together carbon atoms to produce a light, flexible, ultrastrong metal that robots can grip with their climbing treads. Most of the time, the ribbon will be there as a guide rail rather than serving as a big ladder – in other words, it won’t always need to bear a lot of weight. But it will need to withstand being stretched tight, and to resist being torn apart by winds and other wear and tear you’d expect in the upper atmosphere and space.
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