That's Laine's approach in a nutshell. He "mortgaged the hell" out of his building to fund LiftPort's research team, bet the building on the project and lost his building and LiftPort in the financial crisis in 2007.
Laine got LiftPort back in 2011, but not the building that would have nearly guaranteed lifetime income. "I would have never made that decision if I was focused only on greed," he said.
When Laine thinks about what the world has to gain from a lunar elevator, a few things spring to mind. The first includes the space station itself, the valuable resources we would be able to access, and everything we could be using all of those things for right now.
"That could change humanity and that's just the stuff we know," he contends. "Then there's the stuff we don't know."
That's the category that most excites Laine. To make the system work, LiftPort will have to excel at materials sciences, batteries, communication systems, robotics, biosciences – and it must be innovative. He points to all of the people who are alive today because of pacemakers, a technology built on NASA research.
"So what kind of world are we going to have if we take that next big leap?" Laine asks, rhetorically. "All of the spinoff technologies that we craft in the process of building the elevator become assets that we use down here on Earth, and it raises the global standard of living."
Laine wonders what will happen if suddenly 14 nations around the world have access to the moon thanks to a lunar elevator. He sees this as an opportunity to unite nations around efforts to make use of this powerful new tool. He can't help himself from pointing out that two of those 14 nations are Israel and Iran. What if they, too, could work together on this effort?
"I understand that's farfetched," he acknowledges. "But I am trying to build an elevator on the moon here."
