The idea of ​​creating a space elevator was mentioned in the science fiction works of the British writer Arthur Charles Clark as early as 1979. He wrote in his novels that he was absolutely sure that one day such an elevator would be built.

But the first person to come up with such a strange idea was the Russian engineer and founder of Russian cosmonautics Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Inspired by the construction of the Eiffel Tower, he proposed building an even taller tower several thousand kilometers in height. Tsiolkovsky proposed to populate outer space using orbital stations, put forward the ideas of a space elevator and hovercraft.

space elevator- it sounds fantastic. But people in the 19th century also would not have been able to believe in the appearance of such technological achievements as an airplane or a spaceship. Obayashi Construction Corporation in Japan is already developing technical documentation for the preparation of the construction of a space elevator. The project cost is $12 billion. The construction of the facility will be completed in 2050.

The potential benefit from the use of space elevators is quite high. The thing is that overcoming the earth's gravity with the help of jet thrust is impractical. For example, it costs $500 million to launch the Shuttle just once, so launching traditional launch vehicles will become uneconomical.

A space elevator consists of three main parts: a base, a tether, and a counterweight.

A massive platform in the ocean, representing the base of the elevator, will hold one end of a carbon fiber cable, at the end of which there will be a counterweight - a heavy object that will play the role of a satellite that rotates after our planet and is kept in orbit due to centrifugal force. It is on this cable, stretched into the sky to a height of up to one hundred thousand kilometers, that cargo will rise into space.

To deliver a kilogram of cargo into space using a rocket, it takes up to 15 thousand dollars. The Japanese calculated that in order to deliver a cargo with the same weight into orbit, they would spend ... $ 100

The space elevator is a carefully crafted idea. For example, it is calculated that the cable cannot be made of steel. It will simply break under the weight of its weight. The material must be 90 times stronger and 10 times lighter than steel.

As cables, the engineers were going to use carbon nanotubes, but it turned out that it was impossible to weave cables of great length from such a material.

More recently, an invention has emerged that could finally make space elevator fantasies a reality. A team of researchers led by John Budding at the University of Pennsylvania has created ultra-thin nanowires from microscopic diamonds that are much stronger than nanotubes and polymer fibers.

The Tokyo Sky Tree is a television tower in the Sumida district, the tallest among the television towers in the world.

Yoji Ishikawa, head of the research division at Obayashi, believes that the know-how of the University of Pennsylvania is really capable of bringing humanity closer to space. He says that new material, of course, must pass a series of strength tests, but it seems that this is exactly what he and his colleagues have been looking for for so long.

Obayashi has already built high-speed elevators for a television tower with a height of about 635 meters

NASA is now also closely involved in the secret development of the space lift. In the future, it will be possible to deliver parts of giant interplanetary ships into orbit and assemble them in space. Such a project can only be realized with the help of a spacelift.

But the most important thing is that the state, which will be the first to build a space elevator, will monopolize the sphere of space cargo transportation for many centuries.

Illustration for scientific - fantasy novel Kim Stanley Robinson "Green Mars" featuring
space elevator on Mars.

In the 21st century, elevators are no longer just mechanisms that lift loads to a certain height. With the increase in speed and load capacity, elevators are becoming more like vehicles.

An example is the automotive giant from Japan, Mitsubishi. Its engineers have developed an elevator capable of rising at a speed of 60 km/h. But as you can see now - and this is not the limit.

Of course, such elevators are designed for the tallest buildings in the world - skyscrapers. And it doesn't matter what country the building is in, as long as the elevator works. And how else can you raise people to a height of 50 floors? And at 100? If the rate of ascent remains the same, then time will flow incredibly slowly. Therefore, the capacity of elevators is increasing every day.

The best in this business are the Japanese. Obayashi Corporation, on reflection, announced that skyscrapers are far from the limit for it. The company's engineers create an elevator into space. Time of creation - about 40 years. Most likely, by 2050, the grandiose construction will be completed.

It is planned to make the cabin in the elevator as spacious as possible in order to lift several dozen people. People will rise until they are in space. Technologically it is possible. After all, engineers from Japan have developed a special cable made of carbon nanotubes. This material is almost two dozen times stronger and stronger than the strongest steel in the world, you can watch documentaries about this online. Moreover, the elevator will rise at a speed of 200 km / h, which means reaching a height of 36 thousand kilometers in a week.

It is difficult to say who will allocate money for such a project. After all, the development of a space elevator has been going on for many years, starting with theories about this - at the beginning of the 20th century.

Usually so ambitious projects NASA employees are taking over, but they now, like the United States as a whole, have huge problems in the economic sphere.

Will the Japanese pull such a megaproject? Will it be able to pay for itself and bring real profit? We cannot answer these questions. However, the very fact that the Japanese think in categories decades ahead reminds us once again that planning is not the strongest feature of the Russian mentality.

As long as science is popularized in Japan in this way, there is no need to fear for their technology sector, which is closely related to marketing and economics, which in turn feeds science.

The Japanese will build an elevator to space by 2050

This device will be able to deliver people and cargo to the space station, which will also appear in the future.

The Japanese company Obayashi has revealed its plans to build an elevator into space by 2050. The Japanese promise that it will be able to rise to an altitude of 60,000 miles and deliver people and cargo to the space station, which will also appear in the distant future. It is reported by ABC News.

The builders also ensure that the new elevator will be safer and cheaper than the space shuttles. Currently, sending one kilogram of cargo by shuttle costs about 22,000 dollars. And the sci-fi device Obayashi will be able to transport up to 200 kilograms for the same money.

The management of the construction company believes that the emergence of this transport system will become possible with the advent of carbon nanomaterials. According to Obayashi executive Yoji Ishikawa, the elevator cables will be futuristic nanotubes that are a hundred times stronger than those made of steel. Right now we are not able to create long cables. We can still make 3-centimeter nanotubes, but by 2030 we will succeed, he said, adding that the elevator will be able to deliver up to 30 people to the space station in just a week.

Obayashi believes her elevator will revolutionize space travel. The company recruits students from all universities in Japan to work on this project. She also hopes to cooperate with foreign scientists.

Japanese elevators are considered among the best in the world. A Japanese company is also developing the fastest elevator on Earth. Hitachi will provide it to one of the Chinese skyscrapers. This elevator will be able to reach speeds of up to 72 kilometers per hour and rise to a height of 440 meters, that is, up to the 95th floor.

Fifty years ago, people believed that by our time space flights would be as accessible as in their years of travel to public transport. Unfortunately, these hopes did not come true. But, perhaps, already in 2050, it will be possible to get into space by elevator - the concept of this vehicle was presented by the Japanese company Obayashi Corporation.

Elevators are different! There is an ordinary elevator, there is an elevator in the bathroom, there is an elevator inside the aquarium, and the Obayashi Corporation promises to launch an elevator into space in a few decades! In fact, several scientific and engineering groups around the world, supervised by the NASA space agency, are engaged in the creation of such technologies at once. However, according to the Japanese, this process is very slow, so Obayashi Corporation decided to engage in independent development of a space elevator.

The main achievement of the competitions from NASA is that they proved the very possibility of creating a space elevator. Obayashi Corporation promises to launch this unusual vehicle already by 2050!

This elevator will lead from Earth to the space station, located at an altitude of 36 thousand kilometers. But the length of the cable will be 96 thousand kilometers. This is necessary in order to create an orbital counterweight. In the future, it can be used to extend the route of the elevator.

News Scientists are ready to build a diamond elevator into space you can read on your phones, iPad, iPhone and Android and other devices.

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have discovered a way to create ultra-thin diamond nanothreads that could be ideal for a space elevator to the moon. Experts have previously suggested that diamond nanowires could be an ideal material for creating a cable for an elevator into space.

The team of scientists, led by chemistry professor John Badding, created alternating cycles of pressure in a liquid medium for isolated benzene molecules. Experts were amazed at the result, when carbon atoms gathered in an ordered and neatly built chain. Scientists have created nanothreads 20,000 times smaller than a human hair. However, it is diamond chains that may be the most durable material on Earth.

More recently, a team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia has modeled the layout of diamond nanowires using large-scale molecular dynamics studies. Physicists have come to the conclusion that such a material has the potential to be much more flexible than previously thought, if the molecular structure is chosen correctly.

Scientists assumed that elongation of the diamond thread could eventually make the resulting material very brittle, but studies have proven otherwise. Therefore, carbon nanofilaments have great chances for space use, including as a cable for an elevator to the Moon, the concept of which was first proposed back in 1895.

Sources: spaceon.ru, www.bfm.ru, dlux.ru, news.ifresh.ws, mirkosmosa.ru

Prazer's hut - anomalous zone

Guardians of the Underworld - Curse of the Tombs

Time jumps

Assassins: Suicide Assassins

Tiahuanaco

artificial gravity station

In Russia, it was decided to create a private space station, which will have compartments based on artificial gravity. All stages of its construction are planned ...

Ufo on icons and frescoes

In southern Yugoslavia, in Kosovo Metohija, between the towns of Pec and Dzhakovitsy, stands the monastery of Decany. Taking photographs with a telephoto lens...

Iguazu - big water

Iguazu is one of the most magnificent waterfalls in the world. It is located between Argentina and Brazil. Its main part is located on the side ...

UFO sighting

Attempts to understand the essence of UFOs are constantly being made, and among the various areas of analysis of unidentified objects, a special place is occupied by the time in which ...

Kola superdeep well. Sounds from the bowels of the earth

The Kola super-deep well is the deepest in the world and reaches 12262 m. The next deepest was supposed to be...

House with an attic - the dream of a city dweller

Almost everyone modern man dreams of having his own wooden house. After all, natural material is valued more than ever in our time. ...

Sunny Thailand

Holidays in Thailand are chosen by many tourists from the most various countries. The most interesting resort city is Pattaya. It is loved by Russian tourists, so the service...

Surface tension of water

The similarity of the structure of the protoplasm of the cell and ice is amazing. The structure of the latter perfectly integrates with the structure of biomolecules. Living molecules fit so organically into...

It's funny, but a man has a tail. Until a certain period. It is known...

space elevator

Anyone who thinks that nanotechnology can only create something submicroscopic, invisible to the human eye, will probably be surprised by the project being developed in recent times specialists from NASA and attracted so much attention from scientists and the general public. It's about about the project of the so-called space elevator.

A space elevator is a cable several tens of thousands of kilometers long, connecting an orbiting space station with a platform located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The idea of ​​a space elevator is over a century old. The first to speak about him in 1895 was the great Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founder of modern astronautics. He pointed out that the principle underlying modern rocket science does not allow modern launch vehicles to be effective tool to deliver cargo into space. There are several reasons for this:

Firstly, the efficiency of modern rockets is very low due to the fact that the lion's share of the power of the first stage engines goes to work to overcome the force of gravity.

Secondly, it is known that a significant increase in the mass of fuel by several times gives only a small increase in speedrockets. Because, for example, the American missile system Saturn_Apollo, with a launch weight of 2900 tons, put only 129 tons into orbit. Hence the astronomical cost of space launches using rockets (the cost of putting a kilogram of cargo into low orbit is on average about $10,000.)

And, despite repeated attempts to reduce the cost of launching rockets, it seems to radically reduce the cost of transporting goods and people into orbit to the cost of standard air travel based on modern rocket technologies.

fundamentally impossible.

To send cargo into space in a cheaper way, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory proposed to create a space elevator. The cost of launching cargo using an elevator, according to preliminary estimates, may drop from tens of thousands of dollars to $10 per kilogram. Scientists believe,

what a space elevator can do literally turn the world around, giving humanity completely new opportunities.

In essence, the elevator will be a cable connecting the orbital station to a platform on the Earth's surface. Crawler booths will move up and down the cable, carrying satellites and probes to be launched into orbit. With this elevator at the very top, it will be possible to build a launch pad in space for spacecraft going to the Moon, Mars, Venus and asteroids. The problem of supplying energy to the elevator “cabins” themselves was solved in an original way: the cable will be covered with solar panels or the cabins will be equipped with small photovoltaic panels that will be illuminated from the Earth by powerful lasers.

Scientists propose to place a ground-based space elevator base in the ocean, in equatorial waters Pacific Ocean, hundreds of kilometers from commercial air routes. It is known that hurricanes never cross the equator and there is almost no lightning here, which will provide the elevator with additional protection.

The space elevator is described in the works of Tsiolkovsky, as well as science fiction writer Arthur Clark, and the project for the construction of such an elevator was developed by the Leningrad engineer Yuri Artsutanov in 1960. For many years, Astrakhan was an active propagandist of the idea of ​​a space elevator.

scientist G.Polyakov.

But so far, no one has been able to offer a material of such lightness and strength that it would be possible to make a space cable out of it. Until recently, steel was the strongest material. But it is not possible to make a cable with a length of several thousand kilometers from steel, since even simplified calculations indicate that a steel cable of the required strength would collapse under its own weight already at a height of 50 km.

However, with the development of nanotechnology, a real opportunity has appeared to make a cable with the desired characteristics based on fibers from ultra-strong and ultra-light carbon nanotubes. So far, no one has managed to make even a meter-long cable from nanotubes, but, according to the assurances of the project developers, nanotube production technologies are being improved daily, so such a cable may well be done in a few years.

The main element of the lift is a cable, one end of which is attached to the surface of the Earth, and the other is lost in space at an altitude of about 100 thousand km. This cable will not just “dangle” in outer space, but will be stretched like a string, due to the action of two multidirectional forces: centro

fugitive and centripetal.

To understand their nature, imagine that you tied an object to a rope and began to spin it. As soon as it acquires a certain speed, the rope will stretch, because the centrifugal force acts on the object, and the centripetal force acts on the rope itself, which pulls it. Something similar will happen with a cable lifted into space. Any object at its upper end, or even the free end itself, will rotate, like an artificial satellite of our planet, only “tied” to the earth's surface by a special “rope”.

The balance of forces will occur when the center of mass of the giant rope is at an altitude of 36 thousand kilometers, that is, in the so-called geostationary orbit. It is there that artificial satellites hang motionless above the Earth, making a complete revolution with it in 24 hours. In this case, it will not only be stretched, but will also be able to constantly occupy a strictly defined position - vertically to the earth's horizon, exactly towards the center of our planet.

Figure 24. Space Elevator by artist Pat Rawlings*

Reprinted from http://flightprojects.msfc.nasa.gov

To begin construction of a space elevator, it will be necessary to make a couple of flights on space shuttles. They and a special platform with its autonomous engine will deliver 20 tons of tether to geostationary orbit. Then it is supposed to lower one end of the cable to the Earth and fix it somewhere in the equatorial zone of the Pacific Ocean on a platform similar to the current launch pad for launching rockets.

Then they expect to launch special hoists along the cable, which will add more and more layers of nanotube coating to the cable, increasing its strength. This process should take a couple of years, and the first space elevator will be ready.

Curious coincidences: in 1979, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel “Fountains of Paradise”, put forward the idea of ​​a “space elevator” and proposed replacing steel with some kind of super-strong “pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystal”, which became the main building material for this device. The most interesting thing is that Clark almost guessed it. The current stage of interest in the space elevator construction project is connected precisely with carbon crystals - nanotubes with remarkable properties that we have already met.

And what is absolutely surprising: the physicist, one of the participants in the development of the space elevator, is called Ron Morgan. Morgan was also the name of the character in Arthur Clarke's novel, the engineer who built the space elevator!

Despite the crisis and the war of sanctions in civilized economically developed countries, there is a great interest in astronautics. This is facilitated by successes in the development of rocket science and in the study of near-Earth space, the planets of the solar system and its periphery with the help of spacecraft. More and more states are included in space race. China and India are loudly declaring their ambitions in the development of the universe. The monopoly of state structures of Russia, the USA and Europe on flights outside earth's atmosphere. Businesses are showing increasing interest in transporting people and goods into space orbit. Firms have appeared that are headed by enthusiasts who are in love with space. They are developing both new launch vehicles and new technologies that will make it possible to make a leap in the exploration of the Universe. Ideas that only yesterday were considered unrealizable are being seriously considered. And what was thought to be the product of the inflamed imagination of science fiction writers is now one of the possible projects to be implemented in the near future.

One such project could be a space elevator.

How realistic is this? BBC journalist Nick Fleming tried to answer this question in his article “Elevator in orbit: Science fiction or a matter of time? ”, which is brought to the attention of those interested in space.

Elevator to orbit: science fiction or a matter of time?

Thanks to space elevators capable of delivering people and cargo from the Earth's surface to orbit, humanity could stop using environmentally harmful rockets. But to create such a device is not easy, as a BBC Future correspondent found out.

When it comes to predictions about the development of new technologies, many consider the millionaire Elon Musk, one of the leaders in the non-governmental research sector, who came up with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bHyperloop, a high-speed passenger pipeline project between Los Angeles and San Francisco, to be the authority. (travel time is only 35 minutes). But there are projects that even Musk considers practically impossible. For example, the space elevator project.

"This is too technical a challenge. It is unlikely that a space elevator can be created in reality," Musk said at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last fall. In his opinion, it is easier to build a bridge between Los Angeles and Tokyo than to build an elevator to orbit.

The idea of ​​sending people and cargo into space inside capsules that slide upward along a giant tether held in place by the Earth's rotation is not new. Similar descriptions can be found in the works of science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke. However, this concept has not yet been considered feasible in practice. Perhaps the confidence that we are capable of solving this extremely difficult technical problem is in fact only self-deception?

Space elevator enthusiasts believe that it is quite possible to build one. In their opinion, rockets running on toxic fuel are outdated, dangerous to humans and nature, and excessively expensive form of space transport. The proposed alternative is essentially a railway line laid into orbit - a super-strong cable, one end of which is fixed on the Earth's surface, and the other - to a counterweight located in geosynchronous orbit and therefore constantly hanging over one point on the earth's surface. The lift cabins would be electrical machines moving up and down along the cable. Thanks to space elevators, the cost of sending cargo into space could be reduced to $500 per kilogram - according to a recent report by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), this figure is now approximately $20,000 per kilogram.

Space elevator enthusiasts point out the harmfulness of rocket launch technologies into orbit

"This technology opens up phenomenal possibilities, it will provide humanity with access to solar system, says Peter Swan, president of the ISEC International Space Elevator Consortium and co-author of the IAA report. “I think that the first elevators will operate automatically, and after 10-15 years we will already have six to eight such devices at our disposal, safe enough to transport people.”

The origins of the idea

The difficulty is that the height of such a structure should be up to 100,000 km - this is more than two earth's equators. Accordingly, the structure must be strong enough to support its own weight. On Earth, there is simply no material with the necessary strength characteristics.

But some scientists think that this problem can be solved already in the current century. Large Japanese construction company announced that it plans to build a space elevator by 2050. And American researchers have recently created a new diamond-like material based on compressed benzene nanofilaments, the estimated strength of which could make a space elevator a reality in many of our lifetimes.

The concept of a space elevator was first considered in 1895 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Inspired by the example of the newly built Eiffel Tower in Paris, a Russian scientist began to study the physical aspects of building a giant tower that could carry spacecraft into orbit without the use of rockets. Later, in 1979, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke mentioned this topic in the novel "Fountains of Paradise" - his main character builds a space elevator similar in design to the projects currently under discussion.

The question is how to bring the idea to life. “I love the audacity of the space elevator concept,” says Kevin Fong, founder of the Center for Altitude, Space and Extreme Medicine at University College London. "I can see why it seems so attractive to people: the ability to get to the low orbits of the Earth inexpensively and safely opens up the entire inner region of the solar system for us."

Security issues

However, building a space elevator will not be easy. “To begin with, the cable must be made of a super-strong, yet flexible material that has the necessary weight and density characteristics to support the weight of vehicles moving along it, and at the same time is able to withstand constant lateral forces. Now such a material simply does not exist,” says Fong. - In addition, the construction of such an elevator will require the most intensive use spaceships and the largest number of exits in outer space throughout the history of mankind."

Safety issues cannot be discounted, he said: "Even if we manage to overcome the huge technical difficulties associated with the construction of the elevator, the resulting structure will be a giant stretched string that de-orbits spacecraft and is constantly bombarded with space debris."

Will tourists ever be able to use an elevator to go into space?

Over the past 12 years, three detailed designs of a space elevator have been published in the world. The first is described by Brad Edwards and Eric Westling in the book "Space Elevators", published in 2003. This elevator is designed to transport 20-ton cargo due to the energy of laser installations located on Earth. The estimated cost of transportation is $150 per kilogram, and the project cost is estimated at $6 billion.

In 2013, the IAA developed this concept in its own project, providing increased protection lift cabins from atmospheric phenomena up to an altitude of 40 km., At which the movement of the cabins into orbit should already be due to solar energy. The cost of transportation is $500 per kilogram, and the cost of building the first two such elevators is $13 billion.

Early concepts for a space elevator suggested a variety of possible solutions to the problem of a space counterweight designed to hold the cable taut, including using an asteroid captured and delivered into the desired orbit for this purpose. The IAA report notes that someday such a solution may be possible to implement, but in the near future it will not be possible.

Drogue"

To hold a cable weighing 6300 tons, the counterweight must weigh 1900 tons. Partially, it can be formed from spaceships and other auxiliary vehicles that will be used to build an elevator. It is also possible to use nearby spent satellites by towing them into a new orbit.

They also propose to make the "anchor" that secures the cable to the Earth, in the form of a floating platform the size of a large oil tanker or aircraft carrier, and place it near the equator in order to increase its carrying capacity. An area 1000 km west of the Galapagos Islands, rarely prone to hurricanes, tornadoes and typhoons, is proposed as the optimal location for the "anchor".

Space debris could be used as a counterweight at the top end of a space elevator tether.

Obayashi Corporation, one of Japan's top five construction firms, announced last year plans to build a more robust space elevator that would carry automatic maglev booths. Similar technology is used on high-speed railways. A stronger cable is needed because the Japanese elevator is supposed to be used to transport people. The cost of the project is estimated at $100 billion, while the cost of transporting cargo into orbit could be $50-100 per kilogram.

While the technical difficulties in building such an elevator will undoubtedly abound, in fact, the only structural element that cannot yet be created is the cable itself, Swan says: “The only technological problem that remains to be solved is the selection of a suitable material for making the cable. Everything the rest we can build now."

Diamond threads

On the this moment The most suitable material for a cable is carbon nanotubes, created in the laboratory in 1991. These cylindrical structures have a tensile strength of 63 gigapascals, that is, they are about 13 times stronger than the strongest steel.

The maximum achievable length of such nanotubes is constantly increasing - in 2013, Chinese scientists managed to bring it to half a meter. The authors of the IAA report predict that by 2022 a kilometer long will be reached, and by 2030. it will be possible to create nanotubes of suitable length for use in a space elevator.

Meanwhile, last September, a new ultra-strong material appeared: in an article published in the materials science journal Nature Materials, a team of scientists led by chemistry professor John Badding from the University of Pennsylvania announced the production of super-thin "diamond nanowires" in the laboratory, which may even be stronger than carbon nanotubes.

Scientists compress liquid benzene at 200,000 times atmospheric pressure. Then the pressure was slowly lowered, and it turned out that the benzene atoms rearranged, creating a highly ordered structure of pyramidal tetrahedra.

As a result, superthin filaments were formed, very similar in structure to diamond. Although it is not possible to directly measure their strength due to their ultra-small dimensions, theoretical calculations indicate that these threads may be stronger than the strongest synthetic materials in existence.

Risk reduction

"If we can create diamond nanowires or carbon nanotubes of the right length and quality, we can be pretty sure that they will be strong enough to be used in a space elevator," says Badding.

However, even if it is possible to find a suitable material for the cable, it will be very difficult to assemble the structure. Most likely, there will also be difficulties associated with ensuring the safety of the project, the necessary funding and the competent breeding of competing interests. However, this does not stop Swan.

One way or another, humanity is striving for space and is ready to spend a lot of money on it.

"Of course, we will face great difficulties, but the problems had to be solved during the construction of the first transcontinental railway[in the US], and in the construction of the Panama and Suez Canals, he says. “It will take a lot of time and money, but as with any large project, you just need to solve problems as they arise, while at the same time gradually reducing possible risks.”

Even Elon Musk is not ready to categorically dismiss the possibility of creating a space elevator. "I don't think that this idea is feasible today, but if someone can prove otherwise, it would be great," he said at last year's conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although the construction of a space elevator is already within our engineering capabilities, the passions around this structure have unfortunately subsided recently. The reason is that scientists still cannot get the technology to produce carbon nanotubes of the required strength on an industrial scale.

The idea of ​​a non-rocket launch of cargo into orbit was proposed by the same person who founded theoretical astronautics - Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Inspired by the Eiffel Tower he saw in Paris, he described his vision of a space elevator in the form of a tower of great height. Its tip would just be in a geocentric orbit.

The elevator tower is based on strong materials that prevent compression - but modern ideas space elevators are still considering a version with cables, which must be strong in tension. This idea was first proposed in 1959 by another Russian scientist, Yuri Nikolaevich Artsutanov. First scientific work with detailed calculations for a space elevator in the form of a cable was published in 1975, and in 1979 Arthur C. Clarke popularized it in his work The Fountains of Paradise.

Although nanotubes are currently recognized as the most durable material, and the only one suitable for building an elevator in the form of a cable stretching from a geostationary satellite, the strength of nanotubes obtained in the laboratory is not yet enough to be calculated.

Theoretically, the strength of nanotubes should be more than 120 GPa, but in practice, the highest extensibility of a single-walled nanotube was 52 GPa, and on average they broke in the range of 30-50 GPa. A space elevator requires materials with a strength of 65–120 GPa.

At the end of last year at the largest American festival documentaries DocNYC was shown the film Sky Line, which describes the attempts of engineers from the United States to build a space elevator - including participants in the X-Prize competition from NASA.

The main characters of the film are Bradley Edwards and Michael Lane. Edwards is an astrophysicist who has been working on the idea of ​​a space elevator since 1998. Lane is an entrepreneur and founder of LiftPort, which promotes the commercial use of carbon nanotubes.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Edwards, having received grants from NASA, closely developed the idea of ​​​​a space elevator, calculating and evaluating all aspects of the project. All his calculations show that this idea is feasible - if only there is a fiber strong enough for the cable.

Edwards partnered with LiftPort for a time to seek funding for an elevator project, but due to internal disagreements, the project never materialised. LiftPort closed in 2007—although a year earlier, as part of a demonstration of some of its technology, it successfully demonstrated a robot climbing a mile-long vertical cable suspended from balloons.

That private space, focused on reusable rockets, could completely supplant space elevator development for the foreseeable future. According to him, the space elevator is attractive only because it offers cheaper ways to deliver goods into orbit, and reusable rockets are being developed precisely to reduce the cost of this delivery.

Edwards blames the idea's stagnation on the lack of real support for the project. “This is what projects look like that hundreds of people scattered around the world develop as a hobby. No serious progress will be made until there is real support and centralized control.”

The situation is different with the development of the idea of ​​a space elevator in Japan. The country is famous for its achievements in the field of robotics, and the Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima is considered a pioneer in the field of nanotubes. The idea of ​​a space elevator here is almost national.

Japanese company Obayashi vows to have a working space elevator by 2050. The head of the company, Yoji Ishikawa, says that they are working with private contractors and local universities to improve existing nanotube technology.

Ishikawa says that while the company understands the complexity of the project, they see no fundamental obstacles to its implementation. He also believes that the popularity of the space elevator idea in Japan is due to the need to have some kind of national idea that rallies people against the backdrop of the difficult economic situation of the last couple of decades.

Ishikawa is confident that although an idea of ​​this magnitude can most likely only be realized through international cooperation, Japan may well become its locomotive due to the great popularity of the space elevator in the country.

Meanwhile, Canadian space and defense company Thoth Technology received US patent #9,085,897 last summer for their space elevator variant. More precisely, the concept involves the construction of a tower that maintains rigidity due to compressed gas.

The tower should deliver cargo to a height of 20 km, from where they will already be launched into orbit using conventional rockets. Such an intermediate option, according to the company's calculations, will save up to 30% of fuel compared to a rocket.