Posted on 09/01/2026 5:02:14 AM PDT by Libloather
On a visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston last week, President Trump promised American astronauts would establish a permanent presence on the Moon before pushing forward to Mars.
“Our nation will conquer … this vast frontier that we have before us … We will explore it, we will tame it, and we will win it,” he said of America’s present “golden age” of space exploration.
But researchers thinking of truly big ideas say we’ll never get there with today’s inefficient chemical rocket technology. And they point to an important breakthrough.
“We’re really pushing for permanent infrastructure, like a bridge replacing ferries to cross a river,” Pete Swan, president of the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), a nonprofit research and advocacy hub, told The Post.
It’s a simple yet mind-bending concept: an ultra-strong electrified cable running from a point on the ground at Earth’s equator, extended out beyond geostationary orbit (GEO), where a counterweight will float in space keeping it taut. Vessels then climb the cable to deliver goods, people and machines, passing through the atmosphere and into space.
“The beauty is that raising it with electricity saves our atmosphere from pollution, it doesn’t leave any debris along the way and it will be routine, daily, inexpensive, safe. It’s gonna be a bridge to space.”
Crazy as it sounds, the engineering checks out, according to researchers who spoke to The Post.
However, the bottleneck to the space elevator idea has always been the tether material, because it must be scalable, 100 times stronger than steel, exceptionally lightweight and capable of efficient spooling in order to get the whole thing in place.
Next month, the ISEC is set to announce they have their most promising candidate yet—a two-dimensional material called polycrystalline graphene, already widely used in the consumer electronics industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Arthur C. Clarke wrote about this idea in “The Fountains of Paradise” in 1979.
Sounds like the dumbest idea of the century.
The logistics of raising a cable like that are mind boggling. The weight of the cable, even if as small as a thread would have to be supported by the “anchor” satellite, which would not be in geostationary orbit (because the weight of the cable would pull it back to earth, but high enough that it would be at what we currently consider escape velocity. But it would have to start at a much lower altitude and then move farther out as the cable lengthened. Then subsequent cables would need to be lifted on that small thread until you had enough supporting cable mass to lift thicker cables. All the while, the anchor would have to travel further and further into space.
Then what would happen if the poles shifted and the cable was no longer on the equator ...
This is a “not in my lifetime” type of problem.
Put a mosque there. /s
Ben Franklin would be proud.
Agree a waste of time and money just to say we did it.
> Sounds like the dumbest idea of the century. <
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, either. But if they want to give it a try, go for it. Just make sure no taxpayer dollars are involved.
Robert Heinlen would be prouder
The earth's poles don't "shift". Even if something big hit us, it would probably just change the inclination of the poles.
Magnetic poles shift, but the axis of rotation doesn't. Over time, the land shifts due to tectonic movement. Maybe that's what you're thinking of, but that takes millions of years.
If the cable is taken up in sections and then lowered, there are easier installation problems to be solved
Was he into lightening rods?
Or you put the equipment in orbit to make the tether and release the initial tether with one end going towards the earth and the other end sent above geo-sync orbit, so the two opposing ‘forces’ cancel each other. You’ll also need a weight on the tether past the geosynchronous orbit level to offset the weight of the cable and structure below geo-sync orbit (So you don’t need so much tether cable). There’s lots and lots of little details but it’s an engineering problem once we find a material meeting the criteria.
This sounds like a great idea. Until it comes crashing down and kills a bunch of people. Or is blown up in a terrorist attack.
Foundation.
Looks as if someone has seen “Foundation” and I agree. No way would I put myself on something like that.
NASA has been working on the “space elevator” concept for at least 30+ years. I studied with a student 31 years ago who graduated with a degree in materials engineering and was hired by NASA to help with the project.
Forstchen’s novel Pillar to the Sky (2014) explores the concept of a Space Elevator.
Sounds like something that the guys building that high-speed train in California would have lined up as their next project, as soon as the train is operational.
Clarke had some mighty fine ideas. Waiting for technology to catch up with him.
If it is constructed, it might me a safe(r) way to transport nuclear material into space for use to power our space crafts.
We would first need to neutralize some of these terrorist elements that could plague such a project. It would actually need a whole different ‘World Mindset’ to work. And that ain’t gonna happen, is it?
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