Space elevator faces reality - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com

We don't have all the questions, let alone all the answers," Michael Laine, head of the LiftPort Group, told an audience of about 50 people on Saturday during the 2009 Space Elevator Conference on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

Laine probably knows as well as anyone how few answers are available.

LiftPort's Web site is still counting down toward his goal of putting a real live space elevator into operation by 2031. But Laine's years-long quest to turn the concept into an actual business left him hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by 2007, with a legal cloud hanging over his head.

Laine put LiftPort into mothballs and laid low for two years, spending part of that time in the International Space University's study program. It's only been in the past few months that he's been able to lift his head above the clouds again. "We went through some difficult times," he wrote last month in a newsletter, "but are beginning to get all those issues settled to the point where LiftPort will rise again (pun intended)."

Laine told me today that his legal troubles are "kind of in a strange point of limbo," and that he's still massively in debt. But he has enough hope for future ventures that he's willing to get back into the space elevator game rather than moving on to more conventional business ventures.

"I'm actually really happy to be back out there," he said.

Still a laughable idea?
The space elevator concept is one of the highest-flying ideas out there: Imagine a super-strong tether swinging out, say, 100,000 miles from Earth's surface, with laser-powered robots shuttling up and down from a ground- or sea-based station to an orbital platform. If such a thing could be built, the idea's proponents say the system could cut the cost of putting cargo into space from $10,000 to $100 per pound.

The idea is at least a century old - and was most famously popularized by science-fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, who once said the space elevator would succeed "50 years after everyone has stopped laughing."

At last year's Space Elevator Conference, pioneer researcher Bradley Edwards said the first elevator could be built within 15 years, at a cost of $7 billion to $10 billion. The speakers at this year's conference took a far more sober view of the financial and technical resources that would be required. "They're not the rosy numbers that you hear," said Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation, who manages two NASA-backed contests for space elevator technologies.

In a technical paper presented at the conference, Shelef concludes that the conditions required for a working space elevator are "actually very difficult to satisfy" at any price. That's the bad news. The good news is that the technologies needed for a theoretical space elevator project could well lead to payoffs - even if the elevator itself never gets built.