Let's build an Elevator to the Stars

Let's build a stairway to the stars
A lovely lovely stairway to the stars
It would be heaven
To climb to heaven with you.
--Lyrics by Mitchell Parish (1939)

For me, I suppose the dream began in childhood. My mother read to me about the Ladder of Rickety Rungs, a surreal bridge that led from the top of the Mountain of Glimp, across space, and onto the surface of the Moon.

Later, as a more analytical teenager, a similar thought occurred to me: Why not tie a cable between the earth and the moon? Why bother with expensive multi-stage rockets, escape velocities, orbits, trajectories, retro-rockets, soft landings? Once the cable was in place, some means could be developed for creeping or climbing up the cable and ending up on the moon's surface.

The only real problem that occurred to my fevered brain -- as I walked dreamily to school each day -- was the fact that the moon was orbiting the earth and, even more problematically, the earth was spinning on its own axis. The cable couldn't just be hooked on to a hitching post somewhere in Wyoming. But if some sort of track could be built circling the earth -- around the equator, say -- the cable could be connected to something that rolled along the track at about 1,000 mph, as the earth revolved beneath it. If that "something" included a a generator, it could even produce power as it made its daily rounds. Pretty impressive, I thought, to live near that track and watch that puppy shoot by each day, right on astronomical schedule.

I foresaw other practical problems to be overcome, of course, such as the weight of the 250,000 mile-long cable and the varying distance between earth and moon, but these were mere engineering details, best left to the hack engineers. I was more a Big Concept sort of thinker.

It turns out that others have had similar dreams, as a first-page story in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer reveals. In fact, there is an organization called the Spaceward Foundation dedicated to constructing an elevator between earth and an orbiting space station, riding along a fixed cable. And NASA has donated $2 million in prize money to the "Space Elevator Games," being held this week in Arizona, which are devoted to overcoming challenges presented by the concept.

By anchoring the cable to a geosynchronous satellite -- one in an orbit that keeps it positioned over a fixed point on earth -- the Space Elevator concept avoids the need for my somewhat impractical rail around the earth. The two primary problems that contestants are tackling are the development of a sufficiently strong cable and a means of providing power to the elevator as it ascends thousands of miles to the space station.

The most promising development in cable technology has been the development of a carbon "nanotube," composed exclusively of carbon molecules arranged in a cylinder. According to the P-I article, such nanotubes have "stunning strength and flexibility." With respect to power for the elevator, the elevator obviously could not drag along an electrical cord some 22,240 miles into space (the distance of a geosynchronous orbit). Instead, laser techniques are being developed that could transmit power through space, from the ground to the elevator.

Ok, I know, it all sounds weird and crazy. But once we stop dreaming, once we become afraid of sounding nuts, we stop living. I, for one, love the idea. I love the fact that NASA is taking it more or less seriously. I love the fact that, even as we speak, a huge number of Space Elevator fans are blogging on the subject. One of them has even composed a song:

we’ve no need for escape velocity
we’re free
with every mile higher we lose
the weight of gravity
climb the tether together
heading for the counterweight
up the carbon nanotube
spiderweb into space.

Maybe I'll never live to climb to the moon on a ladder of rickety rungs. But I'll happily take an Elevator into Space.