Imagine for a second, a skyscraper, the tallest skyscraper ever built, that’s 100 kilometers
tall.
You could take an elevator from the ground floor of this skyscraper all the way up to
where space begins to a sky bar where you could look at the earth below, and maybe even
be launched into space from there.
It would enable the average person to get around the months, years of space training
and get to experience the majesty of space.
This concept is known as the space elevator, and it's an idea that’s more science fiction
than anything else at this point.
That’s mainly because, Right now, there are no known materials that are strong enough
to enable us to build into outer space.
But what if that changed?
What if a new material was invented and engineers figured out a way to make it happen?
Today, life’s biggest questions ask, Will we ever build into outer space?
Hello and welcome back to life’s biggest questions.
I’m Charlotte Dobre.
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In 1895, Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky envisioned what he called a celestial castle
in space, supported by a huge tower.
Fast forward to 1960, and Yuri Artsutanov, a Russian engineer, modernized the concept.
And then in 1975, Jerome Pearson published a paper about a space elevator.
Heres how a space elevator would look.
Starting with a platform anchored in the ocean at a point on earth along the equator, elevator
cars travel up and down a thick cable using rollers or magnetic levitation to travel.
With this idea, it could take 5 hours or less for the cars to climb up the elevator into
space.
Oh, and to top it all off, one of these space elevator rides would cost perhaps 1/100th
of the price of sending a rocket into space with passengers.
The fact that the only way we can currently get into space, spaceships, is pretty inefficient.
In order for a rocket to be able to make it up there, it has to push against earth’s
gravity and overcome atmospheric drag.
Building into outer space would be a far more efficient, less expensive way to get there.
So why hasn’t it been done yet?
I mean, come on, we are living in the most technologically advanced era the world has
ever known, why can't we have a space elevator.
Well, The interesting thing is, there are currently companies trying to figure out how
it could be possible to build into space.
Thoth Technology Inc has been granted pageants to create an inflatable structure that goes
up into the stratosphere.
But the stratosphere is not necessarily considered space, it's only about 12.5 miles up.
Space begins at an altitude of 100 km above sea level, at a point called the Karman line.
Still though, as it stands right now, anywhere above 31 miles can only be reached with spaceships.
That being said, we still don’t know of any type of material that would be strong
enough to support itself all the way up into space.
Once you get up into the stratosphere, there’s the jet stream, an air current that can reach
up to 275 miles per hour.
Even the best, most lightweight, strongest materials we currently know of could not support
a tower like this.
That doesn’t mean, however, that won’t change in the future.
In 2014, Penn state researchers announced that they had created diamond nanothreads
in a lab.
Furthermore, research is being done into the capabilities of carbon nanotube technology,
and practically every month there is a new milestone reached in graphene research.
Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical tube structures made of carbon molecules that are at least
100 times stronger than steel.
And graphene is the strongest material we currently know of.
Its made of a single layer of carbon atoms.
its 200 times stronger than steel yet its lighter than paper and has extraordinary mechanical
and electrical properties.
There are visionaries who are working tirelessly on the concept of a space elevator.
Like Bradley Edwards, an astrophysicist who’s been working on it since 1998.
Michael Laine, founder of liftport, a company dedicated to the advancement of carbon nanotube
technology.
Perhaps in the future, getting to space will no longer be something that only astronauts
and trained scientists do.
Space could be accessible to everyone.
But as it currently stands, building into space just isn’t possible.
How long until it could be?
Well, according to a new study, a space elevator could be built and operational by 2035.
A report from the international academy of astronautics laid out the concept of a ribbon,
less than a micrometer across, smaller than a red blood cell, but it would be able to
carry up to 7 20 ton payloads at once.
An anchor that weighs approximately 2 million kilograms would keep it grounded to earth,
and people could be sent up the tether to a structure in space.
This space elevator could reduce the cost from 20 thousand dollars per kilogram of launch
to as little as 500 dollars.
Problem is, the substance required to create the tether has not been invented yet.
Once it is though, a space elevator would be quickly constructed and subsequently enjoyed
by all.
For now, I’m Charlotte Dobre, and you’ve been watching life’s biggest questions,
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