Scientist Says Space Elevators Could Become a Reality in the Near Future

What if one day we have an elevator that would not only take us to the upper floors of a building? What if it can take us to the far reaches of the solar system?

This may sound like another wild, sci-fi dream but it could become a reality sooner than we think.

Stephen Cohen, a physics professor at Vanier College in Montreal, Quebec, wrote an opinion article for Scientific American in which he expressed his belief that the futuristic technology would become a reality within "the next two or three decades."

Space Transit

As reported first by Interesting Engineering, Cohen depicts the space elevator as a cable that extends from Earth to space and can be used to transport both people and cargo.

According to his op-ed, engineers and scientists are pioneering new techniques for creating these enormous structures that could fundamentally alter how humans travel to space.

The cost and energy needed to travel to space could be drastically reduced with space elevators. Interesting Engineering notes that businesses like SpinLaunch are already testing novel, potentially game-changing technologies that can decrease the cost of launching small satellites and scientific payloads into orbit.

Space elevators would also have the added advantage of promoting human spaceflight and space tourism since they could launch astronauts, supplies, and scientific payloads into orbit.

The term "space mission" would be replaced with "transit" if space travel becomes commonplace and mostly unaffected by the weather, according to Cohen.

He added that human transits would be less dangerous than present procedures, which require astronauts to take a risk to their lives with each launch.

"A space elevator becomes a bridge to the entire solar system. Release a payload in the lower portion, and you orbit Earth, but do so in the upper portion, and you orbit the sun, all without fuel," Cohen wrote.

The Concept

According to Cohen, his interest in space elevators started in 2004 while he was discussing thesis topics with Professor Arun Misra, the department's leading expert on space engineering at McGill University.

Misra's concept entails a 62,130-mile (100,000-kilometer) cable that extends into the atmosphere from the equator of the planet and connects to a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, which circles at the same speed as the Earth and flies over a fixed location.

The idea also calls for the usage of mechanical climbers to reach various altitudes from the Earth's surface. A capsule or spaceship would either begin orbiting the Earth or the Sun, depending on the altitude at which it was released, or it would crash back to Earth.

However, Cohen acknowledges that space elevators are not practical with the current technologies we have because the material needed for such a cable must be 50 times stronger than steel.

Cohen doesn't work on the technical aspects of space elevators directly, but he thinks we could have the materials needed to make them a reality in the next decade or two. This is because scientists continue to develop stronger materials and technologies for various global infrastructure initiatives.