NOT EXACTLY YET
Brad Edwards will be first in line to ascend
if his dream of building a space elevator is realized, but
for now he needs an assist from a
crane to get off the ground. “In 1999
there were only two people working full time
on a plan for a space elevator,” he says. “As
of January 2005, there will be 50 people spending a
good chunk of their time on it. It’s definitely gaining
momentum.”
One by one, Edwards continues to bat away objections. Corrosion from atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere can be forestalled with a coating of gold or platinum a few microns thick in the danger zone. Hurricanes can be thwarted by making the ribbon’s face narrower (and increasing its thickness) for the first five miles. Terrorists are a concern, but the anchor station in the equatorial Pacific would be remote, with “no way to sneak up on it,” he says. “It would be protected like any other valuable piece of property, in this case probably by the U.S. military.”
What if the thing should snap and fall? Most of it would stay in space or burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, says Edwards, adding that because the ribbon would weigh just 26 pounds per mile, any pieces that fell to Earth would have “about the same terminal velocity as that of an open newspaper page falling.” And would it really cost just $6 billion? “The technical cost is $6 billion,” he says. “That’s different from full program cost. It could easily be twice that, even three or four times that when you get into political issues.” Still, compared with recent estimates for a rocket mission to Mars, which run as high as $1 trillion, even $24 billion for a space elevator looks cheap.
If the elevator works, it means nothing less than a revolution in human destiny. Humans have lived at the bottom of a gravity well for millennia; a space elevator would be a rope dangling into that well. Many people would clamber out. Some, eventually thousands or even millions, would never go back.
In Edwards’s vision, the first project undertaken by a completed space elevator should be building more elevators. While he estimates that constructing the first one would be a six-year $6 billion task, the second could cost as little as $2 billion and take just seven months because it could employ the first to boost construction materials into space. The requisite time and money would shrink for each subsequent elevator, and payload size could increase dramatically. Edwards’s long-term plan calls for climbers on the third and fourth elevators, each hoisting 140 tons.
He says that’s why NASA needs to get serious now: “The guy who builds the first one can have several built before anybody else can build a second one. Now the first guy has so much capacity, his payload price is down to zero. He can run the other guy out of business. Talk about grabbing the brass ring.”
And Edwards emphasizes that the United States is by no means fated to win this race. The first builder might not even be a government. “We have actually been told by private investors, ‘If you can reduce the risk and prove it can be done, getting $10 billion is nothing.’” Having an international consortium of public and private entities pitch in may be the best scenario for ensuring the common good. A world blessed with a half-dozen space elevators constructed cooperatively, radiating from the equator like lotus petals, could provide near-universal access to space at a payload cost of as little as $10 a pound.
In the long run, “you wouldn’t want the elevator only on Earth. A similar system would work on Mars or some other planetary body,” says NASA’s David Smitherman. Indeed, says Edwards, any large object in the solar system that spins could become a candidate for a space elevator.
But for now, Edwards remains focused on getting the first one built. Along with all the other boons it would deliver to humankind, the elevator also has the potential to realize Edwards’s personal dream of voyaging into space. “In 20 years, I’ll be 60. I should still be plenty healthy enough to go on the space elevator. Maybe it will turn out that the only way I can get into space is to build the way to get there myself.”
