It's unclear to me if this is real or the continuation of a publicity stunt from Obayashi (who has been getting press about their plans to build a space elevator for years).
I'm as excited about the theoretical concept of a space elevator as anyone. But the problem remains that no one can produce a cable even close to strong enough. This article has a good description of the material science problem: http://www.spaceward.org/elevator-when. Basically, we would need to find a material that is at least 10x, probably 25x as strong as any cable today.
Carbon Nanotubes are theoretically strong enough, but no one knows how to manufacture them. The longest carbon nanotube tether that has ever been manufactured is only a few inches long, a millimeter in width, and not particularly strong due to imperfections in the manufacturing process.
Obayashi is planning a 10m cable. Even building a 10m cable made of carbon nanotubes would require a Nobel Prize worthy breakthrough.
I agree on the publicity stunt feeling. Space elevators are thought-provoking stuff of science fiction. It would be fantastic if we could build them.
Most I've read on the subject (this article included) are very thin on details, or point out the great scientific hurdles and breakthroughs that still need to be overcome / made.
This article made me think of the publicity stunt some years ago to build a mountain of 3,560 feet high in The Netherlands for $432 billion. The stunt was taken seriously and became world news:
If this is indeed a PR stunt I wonder if it would reflect positively or negatively on Obayashi? Would be like proposing an unrealistic, probably under-priced project. Of course they don't say when it can be realized..
We're only 1 to 1.5 orders of magnitude away from having a material strong enough? Maybe I've been working with computers for too long, but that sounds excitingly achievable.
Okay, that's a joke people. There's no moore's law for carbon nanotube extension (that I know of). There is an analog of electric battery price reduction over time, about 15-30% per year. Here's a graph of it - https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery-cost....
Of course whenever we see a little bit of a pattern, we use a little bit of our ability with this language called math, and declare a law. Calling it a short-term pattern that may or may not continue into the future wouldn't help us feel smarter than the other people in the room.
Those regulations are there for a reason. Safety is important. You don't want your space elevator climbers to fall down. A ripped cable would also be a pretty expensive accident.
<spoiler> Stanley Kim Robinson has very colorful description of space elevator falling on Mars. Basically it should loop around the planet accelerating during the fall, likely supersonic in the end and flatten everything in its path.
A space elevator seems like a much better concept for the Moon. If we could make a permanent Moon base with a space elevator, then it would be possible to use materials from the Moon to assemble things in orbit. Such a base would make it possible to start exploring the rest of the Solar system in earnest.
Launching from the Moon is cheap - magnetic rail and solar power can do the job and cut the need for propellant significantly and there is water enough to make e lot of propellant for delta-v's you'll need. With all that slack, we can relax a bit with mass and use simpler techniques to build ships. A lot of 3D printing and automated manufacturing.
On the not-so-bright side, we'll have to develop new metallurgy and other industrial processes based on local chemistry.
Where would the counterweight have to be for one end to be in high Earth atmosphere, balancing atmospheric drag with lift and gravity? My math tells me the end would be traveling at a relatively tame 260 kph.
Putting an elevator (or more likely a sky hook) at a lunar Langrange point makes some sense, because the tether doesn't have to reach the entire distance if we allow for 0.2km/sec injection/drop-off speeds. That's important, because lunar elevator/hooks are much longer than earth based equivalents, even though their strength and taper ratios are much more achievable (e.g. polyethylene 4:1). You'd want to keep launched weight for the tether as low as possible.
A huge advantage is that a hook at the far lunar Lagrange 2 would be very close to escape velocity (e.g. asteroids or GEO).
The first paragraph in the article says “…aim to launch two small (10 sq cm) satellites connected by a 10m steel cable from the International Space Station.”
The part you quoted refers to the material that might be used for a 96,000 kilometer cable.
I'm as excited about the theoretical concept of a space elevator as anyone. But the problem remains that no one can produce a cable even close to strong enough. This article has a good description of the material science problem: http://www.spaceward.org/elevator-when. Basically, we would need to find a material that is at least 10x, probably 25x as strong as any cable today.
Carbon Nanotubes are theoretically strong enough, but no one knows how to manufacture them. The longest carbon nanotube tether that has ever been manufactured is only a few inches long, a millimeter in width, and not particularly strong due to imperfections in the manufacturing process.
Obayashi is planning a 10m cable. Even building a 10m cable made of carbon nanotubes would require a Nobel Prize worthy breakthrough.