The 62,000-Mile Elevator Ride
money.cnn.com
Rockets are old news. The hottest idea in space enterprise is a tether to take us all the way from Earth to orbit. Meet the startups that think they can make it happen.
By Georgia Flight
March 17, 2006: 3:24 PM EST
(Business 2.0) - Every world-changing wonder has to begin somewhere. But it would be hard for the space elevator to have a less auspicious start than it got last October in a foggy office parking lot in Mountain View, Calif. This was the setting for the first Space Elevator Games, sponsored by NASA, which offered a $200,000 prize to the first team that could make a machine climb up a 164-foot tether, powered by nothing but a mirror and a beam of light from a 10,000-watt bulb.
In fact, none of the home-brewed contraptions on display could reach higher than 40 feet. The device that got the most attention was built by Vince Lopresti, a wheelchair-bound Texan, and that's because he made it from an old wheelchair frame. Ask him why he did it, and he gazes skyward. "I'm doing it to get off this rock," he says with a smile.
The theory behind the elevator is simple. First proposed 111 years ago by a Russian scientist, it was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke in his award-winning 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, and goes like this: Earth is constantly spinning. So if you attach a counterweight to it with a cable, and put it far enough away--62,000 miles--the cable will be held taut by the force of the planet's rotation, just as if you spun around while holding a ball on a string. And if you've got a taut cable, you've got the makings of an elevator.
As strange as that sounds--push the "Up" button, climb in, and soar off into weightless bliss--don't be surprised if it happens. The space elevator is where the PC was in the 1960s: The theory is solid, the materials exist, and people in garages are starting to tinker with the next step. Two Seattle startups are competing to build the elevator. Both believe they can do it within 15 years at a cost of $10 billion. NASA and China's space agency are eager to help make it happen.
And no wonder: A working elevator would reduce the cost of launching anything into space by roughly 98 percent. The $500 million it takes to launch the average satellite (insurance not included) would be a thing of the past. Business won't have seen anything like it since the railroad. "All of a sudden," says Brad Edwards, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist who founded Sedco, one of the startups, "space will be open for real activity."
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So why hasn't anyone tried to build one yet? Because the material needed for the ribbon didn't exist. Until 1991, no substance came close to being strong, lightweight, and durable enough to do the job. Then a Japanese scientist stumbled on an arrangement of carbon atoms that became the strongest material ever tested: carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes are as much as 100 times stronger than steel, yet weigh only a fifth as much.
A handful of companies worldwide, like Carbon Nanotechnologies in Texas, Mitsui in Japan, and Nanoledge in France, are already producing purified nanotubes. The longest nanotubes yet produced measure only a few inches, but that doesn't prevent them from being ribbon-ready. "The nanotubes themselves don't need to be 62,000 miles long," Edwards says. "Cotton fibers aren't long enough to make your shirt--you bond them together."
The real problem is that, at $500 per gram, nanotubes are currently too expensive, and worldwide production is estimated to be less than 100 pounds per day. That's why Michael Laine believes commercializing nanotubes is the key to building the elevator. Laine is a former Marine instructor and CEO of three Seattle tech startups. He was approached by Edwards in 2000, and together they started a company called HighLift. They split after three years, when Laine wanted to have an IPO sooner rather than later. He founded the LiftPort Group; Edwards founded Sedco. Now the two are pursuing the same goal on opposite sides of Puget Sound. |
