Space Elevator
The last payload of SpaceX’s BFR will be a Space Elevator. Even if Musk’s projected launch costs come to pass, with the BFR launching a kilogram for under $2,000 into Low Earth Orbit, nothing can compare to a graphene Space Elevator. And, it’s coming sooner than you expect.
(Of immeasurable value is Aravind’s paper on the topic.)
A space elevator hangs a ribbon down from geosynchronous orbit, and flings another ribbon out toward the stars, with a weight attached to the end. The spin of the Earth is enough to keep that outward strand tugging tight, like the rope on a tether-ball pole. Anchoring in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, the bottom strand is able to avoid most bad weather. That anchor point will become a vast metropolis, quickly, as business rushes there.
According to Aravind’s definitive calculations, a graphene ribbon reaching out to 100,000 kilometers from the surface of the Earth (that’s 62,000 miles) which can loft 1kg, would weigh only 98kg, and the counterbalancing mass would weigh 53kg. Additionally, the ribbon and station may be launched separately, and joined while they float at geosynchronous orbit. Eventually, as the elevator’s lifting pod (the carriage of the elevator) hauls more ribbons into space, then the counterbalance mass can be upgraded to a space station. Considering that the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s heavy-lifting reusable rocket, can propel up to 23,300kg into geosynchronous orbit, then a single launch could haul an elevator which supports nearly 238kg per lifter pod.
Once a single ribbon is in place, the best use of lifter pods is to haul more ribbons. This will continue, rapidly increasing the ribbon width and thickness. The rate at which elevators double could be as little as 2 years, if they can accelerate to a couple hundred kilometers per hour. This is a reasonable velocity, considering that the lifter pod would be like a bullet train, yet it would have no air resistance slowing it down, like the hyperloop.
The bottleneck in this process of doublings is simply the rate of graphene production. We can only create tiny snowflakes of graphene, at the moment. Yet, researchers realized recently that graphene grows perfectly when laid on a crystal of copper. And, other researchers found an easy way to get copper to grow into crystals, so larger flakes of graphene are in the development pipeline already. At the first moment that a production method can make a 100,000 km ribbon, that production method’s owners will receive a massive influx of investment, and their imperative is to scale up production. Ribbons haul more ribbons, as fast as they are made. The equator will fill-up with graphene spokes, like a bike wheel.
Yet, most of the actual traffic on these space elevators will not be into space! Instead, anyone located near a space elevator can use it to climb just 100km into space, close to the height of the International Space Station, but only one one-thousandth of the distance to the outer orbiting mass, the ribbon’s tetherball. From a lowly 100km above Earth, there is no atmosphere to slow you down. So, unlike airplanes, which travel a few hundred miles an hour, a rocket can launch you from 100km up, and you could easily accelerate to over 20,000 kilometers per hour! At those speeds, you need just 45 minutes to fly half way around the world.
Metropolises will sprout up at every ribbon, because anyone who lives at a hub can travel to anywhere else on Earth in just an hour and a half. Getting home might take longer, but the business elite will shift to these islands, especially for their exemption from taxes and national laws. Business brings business, and those islands will be swamped with underlings performing tasks for the elite that have yet to be automated.
This is the future, when rockets are dead because the Space Elevator is an order of magnitude cheaper than even Musk’s Falcons. When the elite escapes the UBI programs of their home countries, in favor of whichever island has laws they like. When travel around the world takes less time than most people spend in traffic each morning. This happens as soon as graphene gets 100 thousand kilometers long. This is when it’s really the future.
With Space Elevators, exploration and mining are economical. Robots will quickly mine Mercury, asteroids like Psyche, the moons of Jupiter, our own Moon, Mars, Saturn’s moons,… likely, in that order. Metals will become ultra-cheap, as kilometer-wide meteorites are crumbled by jack-hammers inside thin film domes that capture all the debris, then scooped up in gliders headed to every industrial site on Earth.
As soon as we have even one ribbon 100,000km long, we’ll be swamped with more of them. Everyone and their neighbor will spend the next 5 years financing local Space Elevator production. And, it will happen soon. A decade, maybe two, then it goes up like a light, multiplies a thousand-fold in a few dozen years. There won’t have been a starker differentiator in history. We’ll refer to time according to the event — Before Elevator, After Elevator. Off…to On, like a switch.
