First space elevator a 66,000-mile cable to the cosmos closer than ever before as scientists make breakthrough
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.Graphene is basically just one unbroken crystal of ordinary pencil lead ato...