About Us

History

The space elevator has been a sci-fi favorite, a planet-to-space transport system of enormous capacity and efficiency, not to mention an architectural wonder.

Our earliest records of the idea date back to 1895 and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russia rocket scientist and space philosopher. The concept has appeared in numerous fictional works even Hollywood movies across the decades.

The space elevator was the stuff of dreams. Until now...

Feasibility

Dr. Bradley Edwards, our founder, was the lead scientist on a number of feasibility studies for the space elevator concept, including the 2003 study commissioned by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, and in his words, There is no reason we can't build one today. We simply need the will to do it.

The surprising truth is the technological gaps that exists in the past are all covered, and have been for some time now.

• We have more than three times the needed tensile strength in current carbon nanotubes.
• We can build fast and efficient electric space elevator climber vehicles.
• We can mobilize the space elevator in order to evade space debris.
• We can power the climbers and achieve better efficiency than any rockets.
• Once a first space elevator is built, we can rapidly deploy more.
• The structure can be built to fail safely even in the event of a system failure.

Furthermore, technologies are rapidly improving on all fronts. It is only a matter of time before humanity builds the first space elevator.

The race has already begun!

Benefits

The benefits could scarcely be overstated.

For those of us that look up to the stars and dream, who work in the space industry already, who hope someday to visit space and look back on our beautiful blue planet... The space elevator accelerates everything.

Rockets cost a tremendous amount, because they incur exponential costs to go to space. They have to carry fuel, to carry the fuel, to carry the fuel, to carry the payload to space. The costs add up exponentially.

The space elevator changes the game.

For the space elevator, the cost of moving a load to space is the cost of the energy to move the payload. You don't have to take fuel with you, or expend fuel to carry to fuel, to carry the fuel, et cetera. This 90% or greater reduction in the cost of getting to geostationary orbit (and further access anywhere in our solar system) brings a world of possibilities.

• There are only a handful of space-fairing nations. A space elevator could make space radically more accessible.
• With a space elevator, we can explore new energy generation systems (gather solar energy in space and beam it back down to Earth).
• Asteroid mining is still alarmingly costly and risky. Space elevators could make asteroid mining a feasible endeavor by reducing the cost of experimentation.
• A variety of scientific studies can go to space, that couldn't afford to before.
• Space hotels, space manufacturing, and a class of new space businesses could become realities.

In Dr. Bradley's words, When historians look back 500 years from now, they will put a breaking point right where we build the space elevator.