Space elevator to the Moon over 8 years pure speculation?

Artist impression of a space elevator.

LiftPort American Group, a private company with former NASA scientist Michael Laine on the head, plans to build a space elevator to the Moon. The ideea is a rocket to carry people or cargo into orbit using a special cable.

For start, researchers plan is to test the system here on the planet. The elevator test will be 2 km long. Subsequently, it will be built. Initially, the company will use a space elevator to connect the Moon first, with a specially designed space station. The station is then connected to a platform on Earth.

Company president Michael Laine believes that it will take eight years to build the elevator. Construction will require one launch a spacecraft, that would resemble technically with the famous Sputnik-1. It is assumed that such a elevator can become a part of today's reality, taking into account the current level of technological development.

Artist impression of a space elevator.

The space elevator, say scientists, help people build bases on Earth's natural satellite and organize the extraction of Helium-3 there, a material that will solve global problems of energy shortages, writes EnergySafe. According to the most pessimistic estimates, reserves of helium-3 from the Moon, will be enough to Earth's population at least 1,000 years.

The idea of ​​a space elevator is not new. For the first time, it was designed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895. Subsequently, the idea has received detailed analysis in the works of scientist Yuri Artsutanov, Rossiyskaya Gazeta wrote.

  But these are only speculations and dreams. There is no material strong enough to build the elevator, not now, not in the near or foreseeable future, because there is the cable weight problem. Even though it will spread outside the Earth's atmosphere, it is too long.

NASA dreams of a trip to the moon on a space elevator that would take 5 hours, and consider this way of traveling into space a premise for the next century.

NASA for a space elevator version is the following:

 A space elevator would be a long cable that extends from the surface of our planet, in space, with its center of mass at geostationary Earth orbit at 35.786 km altitude. Electromagnetic vehicles that will travel along the cable will serve as a mass transportation system for people and other tasks.

   They have to have build a tower about 50 km high, with a cable to be connected at the top. To make the cable not tumble to Earth, it will be hooked to a heavy body beyond geostationary orbit, probably to an asteroid moved in that place for this purpose.

"The system requires that the center of mass to be in a geostationary orbit," said David Smitherman of NASA / Marshall 's Advanced Projects. "The cable is basically in orbit around the Earth."

Sources: Pravda  and  NASA .

Posted in: Astronomy news