Japan is experimenting with a lift to the space

In 2050, you can take a lift to the space. That says the Japanese company Obayashi. It already has a first scale model of the elevator ready.

An elevator to space: it might sound strange, but the Japanese company Obayashi, is not even the first with the idea of plays. Already in 1979, wrote the British sciencefictionauteur Arthur C. Clarke’s idea about an elevator to space down in his book The Fountains of Paradise. Almost forty years later, his ideas form.

Last week showed the company in collaboration with the university of Shizuoka, a scale model of the elevator to the cosmos. On that construction, which is about ten meters high, two small cube-shaped satellites are going up along a koolstofnanobuis. The satellites move with an electric motor.

The technology around this koolstofnanobuis drew the research to the lift again. This matter is much stronger than other raw materials such as steel, allowing the elevator to the room higher you can go, then lifts that we now know. According to the Japanese company Obayashi will lift effortlessly to the space can achieve.

Obayashi dreams of a lift with six oval-shaped cars, each of 18 metres to 7.2 metres long. They were probably about 30 people able to transport via a cable from a platform at sea to a station at 36,000 kilometres above the earth.

The cars were up to 200 kilometers per hour, the tube can rant and would, therefore, eight days after arriving at the space station. The total costs are estimated at $ 9 billion. Much? The way we are now into space travel is not particularly cheap.