Research: Taking the elevator into space

Scenes like this are familiar from novels, films or video games: someone enters an elevator on the ground floor, the doors close, the elevator accelerates. And only when he has arrived in space do the doors open and the passenger gets out. It goes without saying that the world and space are not connected by a rocket, but by an elevator. People commute between planets.

A space elevator like this is one of the great dreams of science fiction. After all, scientists postulated back in the 1960s that a corresponding construct would be theoretically possible. This would require an anchor on Earth, a counterweight in space and a train system that can be driven along. And for a good decade now, there have been no longer just visionary researchers who dream of a space elevator, but also companies who want to put the whole thing into practice.

The Japanese construction company Obayashi is currently working on ensuring that our earth and space are connected by an elevator by 2050. It would be a revolution for space travel. If such a train system were intact, every trip away from this planet would be significantly cheaper than before. Rockets that swallow huge amounts of fuel would no longer be necessary. Instead, the idea so far was that a gondola would be powered by solar power using solar panels.

The leading company is a prominent name in Japan even beyond this project, which may sound unrealistic to many. Among other things, Obayashi built the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest free-standing television tower in the world at 634 meters. And for the project of a lift into space, it is organized in the Japanese Space Lift Company, which already has around 130 institutions, including authorities, research institutes and companies. Many organizations behind the project are reputable.

Instead of dismissing the project as a dream, this can also be said: If a project like this can succeed anywhere, it would probably be in Japan. After defeat in World War II, the victorious United States wrote the country a constitution that formally banned warfare and a military. Since then, investing in space travel has been a form of compensatory national pride. Alongside the USA, the EU, China and Russia, the East Asian industrial state is one of the most important spacefaring nations.

Earlier this year, Japan became the fifth nation in the world to land a spacecraft on the moon. And with the mission leaving the Earth’s surface in 2023, companies are also represented on the moon. Through a cooperation program with industry, the Japanese space agency Jaxa is promoting the participation of companies from all possible sectors in order to contribute their expertise in space. A toy manufacturer, for example, has developed a particularly durable lander. More than 1,000 companies applied for funding.

Interest in space is great in Japan. And the possibilities that would arise from a space elevator would be enormous. Mass space tourism would be conceivable due to the large cost savings by no longer having to use fuel and rockets. It is also assumed that many asteroids have valuable raw materials on Earth, so the idea of ​​mining in space has been toyed with for some time. The cheaper it is to get into space, the more realistic this would become.

However, the gondola project seems to be delayed. When Obayashi communicated his project in 2012, construction was expected to begin in 2025. The business portal Business Insider recently asked the company whether it would stick to this schedule. Yoji Ishikawa, who is responsible for the project, noted that construction work will not start next year. They are busy with “research and development, rough design, creating partnerships and promoting the project.”

The biggest challenge isn’t just the money needed – costs are expected to reach $100 billion. What is particularly unclear is the materials to be used for the cable pull. Installing a lift will require a cable that is around 100,000 kilometers long and is light and at the same time elastic enough to carry heavy loads due to the tensile forces that occur through all the atmospheric changes.

For several years now, great hopes have been pinned on graphene, a carbon arranged in honeycomb-shaped patterns. When rolled up, carbon nanotubes are created from graphene, which are considered to be particularly stable. Whether the substance is stable enough is still being discussed among scientists. And even if it were, so far only carbon nanotubes a few centimeters long have been able to be produced in the laboratory. So there’s still a long way to go into space – further than anyone thought a good decade ago.

There is a prospect that could make the dream of an elevator into space a little more realistic. Not least because of the possibility of mining raw materials in space, several other countries have already shown interest in a lift there. A few years ago, China announced that it wanted to complete its own lift five years earlier than Japan. Canada has also started its own project, and the USA has initiated work on the feasibility of the idea. The whole thing could take off at some point.

Research papers on the topic are published again and again anyway. One of them, published in the academic journal “Acta Astronautica” in 2021, presented a particularly interesting estimate. Matthew Peet, professor of space engineering at Arizona State University in the US, has calculated that certain lift systems could enable a trip to Mars within 40 days. However, it will probably take more than a quarter of a century before that happens. By the time such a trip to Mars takes place, it is likely that there will be significantly more.

Earth and space connected by an elevator. It would be a revolution for space travel.

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