The idea of a space elevator has been bandied about for nearly a century. Instead of building rockets with all their inherent dangers, why not instead simply build an elevator that people could use to ride up past the Earth’s atmosphere. Obayashi Corporation seems to believe it’s possible. They have announced, according to the AFP newswire, via the Deccan Chronicle, that they could design and build one and have it all done in less than fifty years. The Mainichi Daily News in response is reporting that the technology does exist, but there are still many technical details that would have to be worked out.
An elevator to space is possible, the paper explains, because of two things. The first is the physics involved in keeping such a mechanism in place, specifically centrifugal force. That’s the one that pushes an object away from a spinning center, like a tether ball. A space elevator would work exactly the same way. A very long cable running from the Earth to space would be made that would have an object, such as a space platform at its end. Centrifugal force would keep the whole thing aloft. The second thing is something called a carbon nanofiber, which is essentially a really strong, really thin ropelike material that would be capable of withstanding both the centrifugal force and the beating a cable made of it would take having a capsule full of people using it to ride up and down.
It would of course be a lot slower than a rocket, meaning it would take longer for riders to get to space; Obayashi says their elevator (which could hold up to 30 people) would travel about 125 miles per hour, which would mean it would take about a week to get high enough for people to feel like they are in space. Obayashi says it could make an elevator that would go almost a quarter of the way to the moon if there were sufficient funds to do so.
For Obayashi, this is not just wishful thinking, as their announcement seems to imply that they actually intended to build such an elevator and that construction could begin as soon as 2025. The power to run the elevator, they say, would come partly from solar energy and partly from generating plants on the ground.
The company has not said how much they think their project will cost or where it might be built. Nor has it addressed other questions such as how it could be proven capable of withstanding a variety of environment conditions such as extreme temperatures and high winds.