Ready for a ride on a space elevator?

[Buster's Uncle]

Ready for a ride on a space elevator?
CNBC
By John W. Schoen  6 hours ago



Bruce Irving | Flickr



To push the envelope of transportation technology, you need to think big.

And as globalization continues to drive advances in ways to move people and goods around the world faster and cheaper, there's no shortage of ideas.

Some of them may never fly. But others that seemed futuristic just 25 years ago may be commonplace by 2039.

Major carmakers, for example, are hard at work developing autonomous cars that will put computers in charge of braking, steering and avoiding crashes-allowing drivers to text message and surf the Web while on their way to work.

Battlefield advances in unmanned drones are spawning a new generation of flying vehicles able to deliver freight to soldiers in remote locations. The ongoing spread of online shopping makes civilian applications of the technology all but inevitable.

But sometimes even the best ideas never leave the drawing board. Some are derailed by a wide range of forces-from advances in competing technologies to changes in the cost of materials or fuel.

For engineers working on the cutting edge, that can be a delicate balancing act.

"It's sort of like, how do you write a song-do the lyrics come first or the music?" said Robert Boyd, a program manager at Lockheed's Skunk Works unit, devoted to advanced aircraft technologies. "Sometimes it goes both ways. What we create are products at the intersection of what's possible with what's needed."

Sometimes new technologies give older ideas a second chance. Boyd's team is working on a hybrid airship that harks back to century-old dirigibles. These lighter-than-air flying ships are being designed to deliver heavy freight loads to remote parts of the developing world that aren't served by conventional air service-and can't afford the costly infrastructure required to provide it.

The idea sounds simple-which is a good sign to Boyd.

"You know you're getting close when it's getting simpler," he said. "That means you've brought it from the technology realm down to the useful military or commercial product realm."

Then again, some simple ideas turn out to be devilishly difficult to pull off-like flying cars. Terrafugia, a Massachusetts-based private company, said it's getting close to offering a mass-produced "street-legal airplane that converts between flying and driving modes in under a minute."

Bold predictions of flying cars have captured the imagination of Earth-bound travelers since Kitty Hawk-some of them bolder than others. And those "failed" early visions can arouse powerful skepticism about the next Big Idea that comes along.

"We call that the giggle factor-when you talk about a flying car, you have to kind of smile a little bit," said Kevin Renshaw, another program manager at Lockheed Skunk Works. "But a lot of things have evolved in unmanned aircraft in the last 10 years. Sometimes you just have to get the right pieces to come together at the right time."

Renshaw's team is working on an idea most people won't have a hard time with-a freight drone. (Officially known as the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System, or ARES.)

The vehicle-under development for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-is intended to resupply small groups of soldiers in remote, hostile terrain. Controlled by a "militarized iPad," the system would be based with the field unit, available on a moment's notice to return to base for supplies or evacuate casualities-with far less cost or risk than a manned helicopter.

"We want to be the FedEx or Postal Service going door to door for these small groups of soldiers out there in the field," Renshaw said.

Making deliveries in harsh battlefield conditions is one thing. Delivering payloads 1,000 miles into space is another.

Dozens of private companies have now taken up where government space programs-and the public funding behind them-left off. 

Some are specializing in unmanned systems to delivery payloads like satellites into orbit. Others are taking reservations on an emerging market for space tourism.

All of them face the same challenge: to lower the cost of overcoming gravity's pricey pull on people or cargo headed for space. Today it costs roughly $10,000 to put a pound of payload in Earth orbit, according to NASA. To develop commercial spaceflight, that cost will have to come down to hundreds or even tens of dollars per pound.

That's the goal of the International Space Elevator Consortium, a group of scientists, aerospace engineers and other big thinkers devoted to the development of "inexpensive, safe, routine and efficient access to space."

They believe the answer lies in suspending a very long-and very strong-elevator cable from the surface of the Earth to a point thousands of miles in space.

To be sure, the idea seems far-fetched. But when first proposed, so did the idea of setting a 5-ton communications satellite in place 25,000 miles above Earth in a geosynchronous orbit.

Proponents of the space elevator concept point out that the same physics would apply: The pull of gravity on an elevator cable would be offset by Earth's centrifugal force holding it up. Properly designed and built, the cable would hang in place, ready to guide a reusable, electromagnetically propelled payload vehicle up and down as efficiently as the elevator in a modern high-rise building.

Much of the work needed to prove the concept has already been done, according to the consortium's president, Peter Swan.

"The only thing we haven't done is make a material that will go 100,000 kilometers and be strong enough to hold itself," he said. "The material question is the main issue with space elevators."

That issue is closer to resolution, thanks to a new generation of light, high-strength materials being developed in the emerging nanotechnology field.

Swan believes that if production challenges can be overcome, the development of a space elevator would open up a new era in commercial space-from asteroid mining to manned, interplanetary missions.

"We have a lot of challenges, no question," Swan said. "But holy Toledo-if you looked at the San Francisco [Bay] in 1800, you'd have said, 'Ah, there's no way you can build a bridge across there.' It's the way you look at things. The future is there."


http://news.yahoo.com/ready-ride-space-elevator-130000438.html