Japan has taken its first steps towards building a space elevator – Quartz

If you are an insect that dreams of traveling in space, your future is bright. Researchers at Japan's Shizuoka University this month launch a tiny space elevator on an H-2B rocket from Tanegashima Island, about the size of two matchboxes. Surveillance cameras will then watch as the bug-sized compartment tries to slide up and down a 10 meter cable, suspended in the space between two miniature satellites.

The miniature elevator is Japan's first step towards a much larger dream: a fully-fledged space elevator with an elevator shaft that travels 96,000 kilometers above sea level for astronauts and tourists.

Even this rudimentary effort is the result of more than 120 years of wishes, hope and dreams. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Soviet astrophysicist and pioneer of science fiction who predicted inhabited rockets and autonomous space stations in the years before the era of aviation. At the end of the 19th century, after visiting the brand new Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tsiolkovsky was struck by the possibility of building literal skyscrapers. His book of 1895, Dreams of earth and sky, Expose its Vision: A "Tsiolkovsky Tower" 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) high, with a teeming "beanstalk" leading to a "heavenly castle" or a space station at the top. You will take a space elevator to get there, of course.

In the decades that followed, scientists took a few steps in fulfilling Tsiolkovsky's dreams. He had envisioned a "compression structure" like the Eiffel Tower, where balanced forces push against each other to keep the building upright. But researchers in the 1950s could not find any existing building material strong enough to support its own weight at these varying heights. Instead, in 1959, the Russian scientist Yuri Artsutanov proposed to travel a cable of several thousand kilometers between the Earth and a geostationary satellite city, with greenhouses and observatories.

In order for the voltage to remain constant throughout the line, the cable would shrink as it lifted into the air. Here again, the proposed materials thwart his dreams – American researchers in the 1960s determined that cable should be made from unknown materials at least twice as strong as quartz, diamond or graphite.

While scientists have modified these plans, including suggesting using a captured asteroid as a counterweight, science fiction writers and futurists without mathematical constraints have devised a whole fleet of space elevators. Arthur Clarke's novel The fountains of paradise imagine a 22nd century space elevator rising from the fictional island of Taprobane. (It is essentially Sri Lanka, repositioned usefully closer to the equator.) The Clarke Space Elevator is attached by a cable consisting of a "pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystal" Still unknown, produced in space to counter the effects of gravity.

Unless you move entire islands, rooted asteroids, or growing crystals in space, you might think that the space elevator is almost as far away as it was for Tsiolkovsky. This is not the case, according to Obayashi Corporation, Japanese manufacturer of the highest tower in the country. They want tourists to zoom into the space by 2050 and consider other options in case the Shizuoka University project is not launched.