Originally published November 29 2005
Liftport supports space elevator made of carbon
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
At the Foresight Nanotechnology Conference, the space-infrastructure company Liftport and others supported construction of a space elevator. A carbon nanotube ribbon would be central to the design.
Liftport, a space-infrastucture company, has been among those who support construction of a space elevator, a long thin cable made of carbon nanotubes anchored to a platform or ship at sea and extending out into space.
Held in place by the earth's rotation, the space elevator, with the help of robots, would ferry materials to outer space.
The carbon nanotube ribbon that is central to building an elevator to space will actually have more practical and immediate applications, Laine said.
"Way before you see an elevator climbing into the sky, you are going to see buildings and bridges built in an entirely new way," Laine said here.
"The thing is a lot closer to a bridge-type project than an aerospace project."
The ribbon for the elevator will be "about 8 inches wide, paper thin and thousands of miles long," said Laine.
Those dimensions have caused skeptics such as famed physicist Freeman Dyson to theorize that a space elevator, if built, will be somewhat dangerous.
Carbon nanotubes are stronger than steel but presently are made in small batches in laboratory furnaces.
"A span of a bridge is never going to be an issue again.
It is going to be a question of economics rather than structural materials," he said.
Other possible nearer-term applications involve new types of cellular antennas or high-altitude traffic monitoring devices kept aloft in a long ribbon.
Newfangled as can be, the space elevator owes some of its heritage to the ancients, he said.
To build a space elevator, rockets would be sent into outer space to begin spooling out the carbon ribbon.
"This is the same concept the ancient Romans used for building a bridge.
They'd take an arrow with a string attached to it and shoot it across a canyon.
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