Taylor opined in early 2021 that space elevators, not the ones in high-rise buildings, although I'm sure plenty more of those exist in your time. Condensed city living makes environmental sense, as do vertical farms; stronger and lighter building materials mean more towers; the international competition for tallest skyscraper is unlikely to end any decade soon.
No, the Elevators I mean are the ones that deserve capitalization: Space Elevators. We’re talking super-tall, super-thin tethers that deliver people, satellites and other goods to high Earth orbit in elevator cars the size of trains. If the scientists and engineers who have been theorizing about the Elevator since the 1960s are right, then this is the most ingenious method ever devised for escaping our clingy little gravity well — which is responsible for at least 90 percent of the cost of getting to space.
If it’s as simple as closing the doors and pushing a button that says “Zero G,” then all your space infrastructure will be delivered on the cheap, without spending a dime on fuel. There’s enough solar energy available, especially at the top of the ride, to power the whole system. Those wild new frontiers we’ve been talking about (asteroid mining, lunar settlement, cloud cities above Venus, even Mars colonies if you can get around the toxic Martian soil problem) suddenly become way easier to establish.
How long the Elevator ride will take is something you know better than us — some say a few days, some say we can get it down to hours. But I’m sure you’ve made plenty of entertainment and intoxication options available in the spacious cars, for when the stunning view gets stale. Besides, slow and steady is more sustainable than a system of chemical bomb-like rockets that spew space junk everywhere. (Looking at you, giant Chinese rocket core that tumbled to Earth as I wrote this letter; Elon Musk’s SpaceX is no saint when it comes to littering either, shedding its rocket detritus on protected beaches as well as farms.)
The economic argument is as compelling as the environmental one. So SpaceX is proud of reducing the cost of getting stuff to orbit to $6,000 per pound in its rockets, down from $120,000 per pound on the Space Shuttle? That’s cute. Space Elevator scientists say they could get the delivery price down below $100 per pound. Musk says his Starship will end up costing $8 billion to develop and $2 million per ride just for fuel and other operating costs? The Elevator may cost $6 billion or less, and would be relatively low-cost to operate.
Still, half a century after it was first conceptualized, the Elevator dream remains just that — a dream. The science is sound, but it also tells us that a tether that tall would carry so much tension that you need to build it out of ultra-strong materials. The steel or aluminum alloys we use to build spaceships won’t cut it. We know it has to be some high-tech form of carbon — like diamond, but stronger, lighter and more flexible. The current favorite is called single-crystal graphene, but it’s barely out of the lab.
We could speed up the process if we wanted, of course. NASA could probably build three or four Space Elevators for the $28 billion it’s spending on returning to the Moon. But it’s hard to summon the will to build something nobody has ever seen. Science-fiction visionaries have done their damnedest to help us imagine it, from our old friend Kim Stanley Robinson to the late, legendary Arthur C. Clarke. It’s been 42 years since Clarke’s award-winning bestseller The Fountains of Paradise showed a Space Elevator being constructed during — you guessed it — the 22nd century.
Until this year, I would have said that timeline was too optimistic. But this year’s news has changed my mind, and now I think there’s a strong chance there are multiple elevators in the skies around your planet. Not only are China and Japan making tentative plans for Space Elevator construction, on and off Earth, but a new paper from an engineer at a Canadian university has outlined how we could build a Space Elevator using materials readily available in 2021.
All it takes is one crucial tweak to the traditional design: We don’t put the ground floor on the ground.
[Read on, reasonably interesting ...]
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