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Sci-fi fans and marginal technicians may already be familiar with the "space elevator" idea, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – and totally impossible with today's technology. But two scientists think they have found an alternative: a lunar elevator. And it's a little less crazy … technically.
The idea of the space elevator, explored for the first time in detail by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel "The Fountains of Paradise," is essentially a tower so high that it reaches the point of view. ;space. Instead of launching vessels and materials from the Earth's surface into orbit, simply place them in the elevator of this tower. When they reach the top, somewhere in the geosynchronous orbit, they are already out of gravity because of all the intentions and goals.
It's a fun idea, but the simple fact is that this tower would need to be so strong to support its own weight, and that counterweight located at the bottom, that no material known or even reasonably hypothetical will not do it. Not far away. The space elevator thus remains well on the "fiction" side of science fiction since its first proposal. Did not stop people from patenting it, though.
But what if I told you we could make an even bigger space lift with the materials available today? You would say that I am absolutely not qualified to design such a structure – and you will be right. But two astronomers from Cambridge and Columbia Universities think they have an alternative. They call it Spaceline.
The secret is to abandon the very concept of anchoring the space elevator to the surface of the Earth. Instead, they offer a tower or cable extending the other direction: from the surface of the Moon to the geosynchronous orbit around the planet.
Unsurprisingly, this idea has already been put forward since the 1970s. But as Zephyr Penoyre and Emily Sandford say:
We present these derivations here as a complete and autonomous mathematical and physical description of the concept, a discovery that we and the authors who preceded us were surprised to find that it is eminently plausible and may have been overlooked as a major step in the development of our capacity as a species. to move in our solar system.
Maths by Cambridge and Columbia. Diagram by MS Paint.
In other words, others have already suggested, but they did the math. And it really works. And that could only cost a few billion dollars.
The Espaceline would look more like a skyhook than a tower. A thin, solid piece of fabric (think the width of a pencil lead) that stretches 225,000 km from the moon's surface to a safe distance above the planet, where it will not interfere with satellites or meet our pesky atmosphere.
Anyone interested in going to the Moon would simply jump to the correct orbit height and synchronize with the tip of the Spaceline, where there would probably be some station. From there, they could use solar powered propulsion to travel the line without fuel. At the other end, they just slow down and land softly in a lunar orbit or any other surface that we install on the regolith.
Importantly, the space line would pass through the Lagrange Earth-Moon point, where there is indeed a zero gravity and no other physical interference, which facilitates construction and storage.
Having only a small team of scientists and engineers in such a base camp would build and maintain by hand a new generation of space experiments – one could imagine telescopes , particle accelerators, gravitational wave detectors, vivariums, power stations and launch points for missions. to the rest of the solar system.
It sounds nicer than the tiny Moon Bridge, NASA, had planned.
Although researchers say that it is "not an idle theory", it is, provided that this theory is more realistic than a theory so unrealistic that no one takes seriously. Nevertheless, the possibility is tempting now that someone has miscalculated the numbers. Perhaps one of these space billionaires will make a lunar elevator their next passion project.
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