Some experts say a classical space elevator might make more sense than a lunar space elevator, at least initially, because it could help facilitate exploration. “One thing that’s frustrating is the lunar space elevator idea doesn’t have much traction, and yet it’s a feasible idea and economically a game-changer,” says Space Initiatives CEO Charles Radley. But as of now there is no SpaceX for space elevators, even though companies in China and Japan have floated proposals for building classical space elevators by 20, respectively. NASA has funded occasional studies on classical space elevator concepts since the late 1970s. It could be made from Kevlar or other existing materials rather than the exotic and hard-to-make carbon-based materials that have long been seen as the key to building a classical space elevator.ĭespite their potential advantages over rocket transport, neither lunar space elevators nor classical space elevators have gotten much attention from space agencies or aerospace manufacturers. (The cable of a lunar space elevator couldn’t be anchored to Earth’s surface because the relative motions of the moon and our planet wouldn't permit it.)Īs explained in the paper, the simplest version of the Spaceline cable might be barely thicker than the lead in a pencil and might weigh about 88,000 pounds - within the payload capacity of a next-generation NASA or SpaceX rocket. Its central element is a cable that would be anchored to the moon and span more than 200,000 miles to a point above Earth's surface - perhaps an orbit about 27,000 miles from our planet. Penoyre and Sandford, a graduate student in astronomy at Columbia University and a co-author of the study, call their lunar space elevator concept Spaceline. “It shocks me how cheap it could be,” says study co-author Penoyre, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Cambridge, adding that the $1 billion it might take to build such an elevator “is within the whim of one particularly motivated billionaire.” A very long cable 25 on the online research archive arXiv, the students contend that it’s technologically and financially feasible to build such a "lunar space elevator," which was first publicly detailed by Jerome Pearson at a conference in 1977 and by Yuri Arsutanov in a separate paper published in 1979.
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