Loss, Sacrifice & The Space Elevator
One man’s tortuous road to building the biggest thing ever, and why I’m making a film about it.
I’m the director of Shoot The Moon, a feature documentary that has one day left to fund on Kickstarter. Here’s why this project is so important to me.
Michael Laine spent a long time living on the couch in his best friend’s rec room, recovering emotionally from the body blow he had received. He’d been working on building a space elevator for almost a decade, having started as a contractor on a NASA research grant. Before the financial crisis in 2008, the former marine had real-estate holdings that enabled him to fund space elevator research and focus on it nearly full time, but he lost his entire net worth and company, LiftPort, when the market collapsed. At a space elevator conference in 2011 he walked out with a friend, frustrated at the plodding academic nature of the proceedings.
He didn’t want to talk about space elevators. He wanted to build one.
They retired to a family-style Mexican restaurant where margaritas came into play, and inspiration struck. The central problem with building such an elevator on Earth — by no means the only problem, but the central one — is that no material currently producible in large, consistent quantities, is strong enough to hold the system together. The tensile strength the cable would need is something predicted to be possible with carbon nanotubes, but nobody is producing them in sufficient quantities to create the stupendously long tether the Earth system requires.
This is a problem that has been five years from being solved for at least a decade.
The insight Michael and his friend had that night is that conventional materials already being manufactured could be used in a lunar system. The Moon’s gravitational pull is, after all, about a sixth that of the Earth’s.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, a space elevator is simply a very long string connecting the surface of a planet — or moon— to space. In short, it’s a way to get to and from space without a rocket. If one were built on Earth, it would be positioned on the equator, and the top of it would be a counterweight held out in space by centrifugal force from Earth’s rotation.
In the case of a lunar elevator, the tether would stay straight because a counterweight pulled past the lagrange point toward the Earth would be caught in Earth’s gravity well, while the tether was anchored to the Moon. If you had space elevators on the Earth and Mars, you could use the momentum of the planet’s turns to fling spacecraft from one to the other, vastly reducing the amount of fuel needed to travel between the planets.
A lunar elevator would obviate the kind of complicated and heavy landers that the Apollo missions boosted off our planet atop Saturn 5 rockets. Manned moon missions would become routine, and cheap enough for many nations to take part in. In fact there are already more than a dozen nations that have enough launch capacity to get people to the moon via a lunar elevator.
In 2012, Michael took his idea to Kickstarter to raise $8,000 for an experiment: they wanted to test a prototype design for the lunar elevator. They raised $110,353.
With the funds, LiftPort aims to test the design of a robot that will climb the tallest free-standing human structure in existence: a roughly 24,000-foot tether held aloft by a trio of balloons. It’s never been done before, and when they do it, it’ll be the highest a robot has gone without the help of rockets or an airplane.
Previously, LiftPort has built about twenty robots designed to climb a three inch wide ribbon of drywall tape, a grippy material analogous to the shape of the tether an Earth-based system would use, but the new material would be a round string of slippery synthetic fiber, presenting a whole new list of challenges for their robot.
I backed their project, and because I was making a monthly webseries for Engadget at the time, I decided to make a segment about their effort. I met Michael when he passed through New York on a series of trips he took after his Kickstarter campaign ended. He was evangelizing his project and trying to find capital to seed his newly rejuvenated efforts to build a viable commercial enterprise trying to initiate the Moon’s first construction project. We interviewed him, and then over the next month I traveled to San Diego and Seattle to film the rest of the video. It came out great, but it never felt complete, because we didn’t get to film the experiment they had promised to do with their Kickstarter money.
I fell in love with LiftPort’s idea. I want to live in a society that has a sense of purpose and adventure. I can’t really make a call on the economics of building a space elevator on the Moon — Laine estimates a sub-$1 billion price tag to build it, and possible returns including generating space-based solar power and mining Helium 3 from the Moon — but I can say that I want it to happen for what it would say about the kind of future humanity chooses to have.
Laine describes us as a “single point of failure species,” meaning that any event sufficiently catastrophic to end all human life on Earth would permanently erase us from existence. If we were to branch out to other bodies in our solar system and eventually in our galaxy, however, we vastly improve our ability to preserve the legacy of humanity. The technology we would develop on our way towards this goal, would also improve the quality of life for humanity along the way.
As musician and raconteur John Roderick stated in that same Engadget Show episode, “if we are in fact just a virus desecrating our home environment to the point that we can’t live here anymore, why shouldn’t we go out in space and become a super space virus?” Indeed, why shouldn’t we?
Last January I was winding up my work at Engadget, and starting to think about what I wanted to do next. I had a few sleepless nights thinking about the unfinished piece I had made about these space elevator guys out in Seattle. I had never gotten to document this amazing experiment, and as far as I knew, they hadn’t done it yet. I called Michael one day and asked if he’d be willing to let me make an independent feature documentary about his efforts. To my delight, he agreed, and has given me almost totally unfettered access. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time in Seattle documenting the ongoing effort to do the big experiment.
I was a regular at the Chabot Space and Science Center when I was growing up in Oakland, CA. I had space legos. I vividly remember getting a head rush on the way to Video Express to rent the Star Wars trilogy on VHS when I was five or six years old. The subjects of the film, my first feature length project, are that excited about space on an ongoing basis.
As we’ve worked on this film, we’ve gone much deeper into the lives of the folks at LiftPort who are trying to make the lunar elevator a reality. Michael and his best friend David are the best subjects a documentarian could ask for.
David is a straight-shooting engineer who develops software for Microsoft. He has twin braids coming off his beard, and he owns a huge collection of pinball and arcade games for which he recently built the Let’s Play Cafe, an amusement hall that can house around 20% of his collection — the rest are packed into shipping containers strewn around the property he lives on in rural Washington. David has been developing robots with Michael for years, and they have a lifelong, brotherly friendship. David is married and has two daughters, and he cites giving his daughters a choice of whether or not to live on Earth as a prime motivation for the role he’s played in trying to build a space elevator.
A lot of setbacks have befallen Michael. He spent most of 2013 caring for sick parents instead of fulfilling backer rewards on his Kickstarter or moving the chains on his experiment. The money he raised had mostly gone into trying to solicit investments for his company that never materialized, so many of the backers in his Kickstarter community began to believe he had been defrauding them all along. “Never mess with people’s sense of hope,” is an aphorism that Michael states aloud almost reflexively now. He has taken a lesson from his Kickstarter, but it’s up for debate whether he has really internalized the community’s concerns, because many of the t-shirts and other rewards remain unsent.
The documentary has turned into a story not just about the lunar elevator, hope for humanity’s future, and our imperative to take to the stars, but the kind of person that takes responsibility for getting us from here to there. There are a lot of creature comforts Michael forgoes for this project. He’s spent so much of his life on this that it’s hard to imagine him switching to a normal career if he ever gave up. He has more or less bet all his chips that he can build a lunar space elevator. I’m forced to wonder if we could ever build one without people who take it as seriously as Michael does.
As we work on the film, we’re taking a long shot of our own. We want to depict a working lunar elevator using practical effects, shooting miniatures using the same techniques that brought the space battles in Star Wars to life. I think giving a gee-whiz sci-fi tone to the project will help convey the emotional center of the piece for me, which is a longing desire I have to be a part of a species that won’t settle for just living on Earth.
