On a visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston last week, President Trump promised that American astronauts would establish a permanent presence on the Moon before moving on to Mars. “Our nation will conquer… this vast frontier before us… We will explore it, we will dominate it and we will win it,” he said of the current “golden age” of US space exploration. But researchers thinking really big ideas say we’ll never get there with today’s inefficient chemical rocket technology. And they point to important progress. An AI illustration shows what a space elevator made from polycrystalline graphene would look like to transport cargo, and then possibly humans, into space. An AI illustration shows what a ground-based space elevator port would look like, anchored along the equator in the ocean. AI illustration by Jesaca Lin/NY Post “We’re really pushing for permanent infrastructure, like a bridge to replace shuttles to cross a river,” Pete Swan, president of the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), a nonprofit research and advocacy center, told The Post. It’s a simple but mind-blowing concept: an ultra-strong electrified cable running from a point on the ground at Earth’s equator, extended beyond geostationary orbit (GEO), where a counterweight will float in space keeping it taut. Ships then climb the cable to transport goods, people and machines, through the atmosphere and into space. “The beautiful thing is that raising it with electricity saves our atmosphere from pollution, it does not leave waste on the way and it will be routine, daily, economical and safe. It will be a bridge to space.” As crazy as it may seem, the engineering works, according to researchers who spoke to The Post. A graphic showing what a space elevator taking materials out of Earth’s atmosphere could look like. Donald Pearsall / NY Post Design Space elevators located in three oceans around the equator could provide stable and constant traffic to space. Donald Pearsall / NY Post Design However, the bottleneck for the space elevator idea has always been the tether material, because it must be scalable, 100 times stronger than steel, exceptionally lightweight, and able to be coiled efficiently to put everything in place. Next month, ISEC will announce that it has its most promising candidate yet: a two-dimensional material called polycrystalline graphene, which is already widely used in the consumer electronics industry. Graphene is basically an intact crystal of ordinary pencil lead atoms, which was long thought to be an ideal candidate for such a project, the researchers said. Polycrystalline refers to a mosaic process that makes the molecule more scalable. President of the International Space Elevator Consortium, Dr Peter Swan (right), said: “We are really pushing for permanent infrastructure, such as a bridge to replace shuttles to cross a river.” spaceelevatorblog.com “The beauty is that lifting it with electricity saves our atmosphere from pollution, leaves no waste along the way and will be routine, daily, economical and safe. It will be a bridge to space,” said researcher and advocate Peter Swan. isec.org “It looks like we found the material,” Swan said. “We are much, much more advanced than we were six months ago. Technology doesn’t follow a linear line, it grows. “Every once in a while, someone makes a discovery and suddenly capabilities go from being linear to really huge leaps in capability. That’s what’s happening in our fastening material space. “[Polycrystalline graphene] It’s so tremendously strong. They are taking it and turning it into bulletproof vests; one cape can stop a .38 bullet from a gun.” Stargazers have been devising ladders to space for more than a century with the idea popularized by famed British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in his 1979 novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” where the megastructures he envisioned were called “orbital towers.” Arthur C Clark’s 1979 “Fountains of Paradise” popularized the idea of space elevators, which he called “towers.” orbitals.” A diagram shows the structure of polycrystalline graphene. Derived from the lead of a common pencil, some researchers envision stacks of a 66,000-mile-long graphene molecule acting as a tether for a space elevator. ResearchGate/Creative Commons Clarke, author of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” took pains to precisely detail the real-world engineering that such a feat would require, commenting that a space elevator would be built “about fifty years after everyone stopped laughing.” Swan likes to remind detractors that in 1969, after the moon landing, the New York Times issued a formal apology for a decades-old editorial that mocked an engineer who suggested that rockets would one day take man to the moon. Each connecting strand would actually be a single molecule—one atom thick, a meter wide, and 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) long. long) that would extend from a “Earth port” on the surface, which will have to be located at the equator, to an “anchor at the apex” spaceport far beyond geostationary orbit. Earthset is captured through the window of the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon on Monday, April 6, 2026. NASA via Getty Images A 3D model of the planet Mars, in which the President Trump wants to see American boots one day. Universal Images Group via Getty Images A single tether, or leg, is 20,000 stacked sheets of this molecule, as seen by ISEC. The colossal cable would be almost invisible, Swan said, but reflective, like a mirror, and viewers on the ground would occasionally catch a thin, long flash of reflected sunlight falling from the sky. The ISEC report notes that South Korean engineers have managed to make a polycrystalline graphene molecule from. 1,000 meters long and half a meter wide, which can occur at a speed of about two meters per minute. Damage to the tether from space debris orbiting low-Earth orbit remains a major concern, Swan said, so he proposes something like five tethers per elevator, for backup and other uses, as well as a no-fly zone for surrounding satellites. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope takes off from the Kennedy Space Center in. Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 31. ZUMAPRESS.com The plan is for cargo ships, called climbers, to crawl skyward using the tether until they reach GEO, which occurs 22,000 miles above Earth. The trip to the top would take about two weeks, Swan said. After GEO, the gravitational sweet spot where the Earth’s gravity equals the exact internal force needed to match the Earth’s rotation, the climbers will no longer. They need electricity for propulsion. The centrifugal force of the rotating Earth takes over, launching the payload along the remaining 40,000 kilometers of tether before launching it into space at 16,000 miles per hour (4.4 miles per second), according to ISEC calculations. That means material could be sent from the top of the tether to the Moon in just 14 hours, a trip that currently takes three days from Earth. just 61 to 120 days, depending on planetary positions at the time of launch, Swan said. The fastest route to the Red Planet today takes seven months, with a launch window that only occurs every 26 months. Dr. Armen V. Papazian, a professor of space economics at the American University of Dubai, told The Post.[Investors] They are looking for a return. They want a risk-adjusted return and, hopefully, they want to achieve it while they’re still alive.” REUTERS “You could do daily launches to Mars,” Swan said. But there’s still a long way to go for a space elevator to work. “It’s not certain,” said space economics professor Armen Papazian of the American University of Dubai. “Even if you started building a space elevator tomorrow, assuming they found the venture capital to do it, it would take a decade or two to complete, assuming things go good.” From lunar villages to Martian cities to asteroid mining, space enthusiasts have long felt that rockets will never be enough. A concept artist obtained from NASA’s website on September 26, 2000 shows a space elevator. The structure is envisioned to extend from the Earth’s surface to a geostationary Earth orbit as part of a 21st-century mass transportation system. NASA/AFP via Getty Images Artist’s rendering of a proposed lunar hotel. GRU Space La The “tyranny” of the rocket equation, as one NASA researcher put it in a 2012 paper, is that to reach the speed needed to escape Earth’s gravity, rockets must be 85 to 95 percent propellant. The payload typically represents only 2 to 4 percent of the liftoff mass. ISEC has proposed a cheeky $15 billion price tag to build the first elevator. They say it would be a bargain, if it were possible. The recent launch of Artemis, which sent humans back to the Moon for the first time since 1972, amounted to $4 billion. just moving things up. Once we get past that and the Moon starts getting settlements and Mars needs more, we’ll start having two tracks, knocking things down. After 15 or 20 years we could make people.” The nonprofit says a space elevator will be able to transport 30,000 metric tons of cargo into space per year from the start. It would be a staggering annual haul, more than the combined weight of all the objects sent to space since 1957. However, it remains a tough sell for most. “By the time a project like that starts generating cash flow for investors, it could be two and a half or three decades,” he told The Post. Papazian, author of “The Spatial Value of Money: Rethinking Finance Beyond Risk and Time.”[Investors] “They are looking for a return…hopefully while they are still alive,” he added, adding that public money is also subject to ever-changing political whims and debt restrictions.
