DailyDirt: Listening To Muzak On A Long Space Elevator Ride...

Techdirt|Michael Ho

Reliable space travel is slightly elusive. Sure, we have a few rocket systems that can take people up to low Earth orbit, but there's always the chance that those rockets will fail and explode in the sky. On top of that, re-usable rockets haven't quite lived up to their promised cost effectiveness, though some progress is being made on that front. A space elevator could provide a nice alternative, obviating the need for explosive chemical thrust to get to orbital altitudes. But where would we put it, if it's even possible to build one? (Maybe on Mars first....)

• The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) believes it will be possible to get a kilogram of payload into geosynchronous orbit for just a few hundred bucks... someday. There's still no known material that's strong enough to do the job necessary to build a space elevator, but there are a few promising candidates. [url]
• Graphene might be a suitable material for a space elevator tether, but no one has figured out how to make miles of it yet. Researchers are working on making large-scale amounts of graphene, but it's still in experimental stages. [url]
• There are more than a handful of significant challenges that need to be solved before anyone gets a working space elevator. The most obvious problem is creating the tether material, but there are also vibration issues on the tether, the problem of keeping the tether relatively stationary, possible collisions with all kinds of space junk, the environmental risk of an enormous tether to space, and all the unknown maintenance costs. [url]

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