Even going up twelve stories in an elevator leaves some of us wondering just how reliable this thing is—so if we were heading up into space in an elevator we’d want to know it was made of pretty strong stuff.
That stuff, if such an elevator was ever to be built, could be a new carbon-based wonder material that could rival graphene: diamond nanothreads. The one-dimensional carbon crystals are as strong as a diamond, but could conceivably build a space elevator that doesn’t cost as much as 5 squillion engagement rings (we admit we haven’t quite done the math on this).
The one lab that has so far produced the nanothreads, at Penn State University, hasn’t made it clear how easy it would to be to mass produce the fibers, and there’s a concern they will become increasingly brittle as they get longer (obviously a bit of a worry where space elevators are concerned).
However, according to Gizmodo, a recent modeling study from a team at the Queensland University of Technology shows that when molecular defects are inserted into the otherwise repetitive benzene ring structure of a diamond nanothread, the fiber becomes highly ductile. With the right molecular design, the researchers suggest, the diamond nanothreads could be “ideal for the creation of extremely strong three-dimensional nano-architectures.”
Could a space elevator really happen?
Space elevators are still, of course, a little far-fetched. But a 2015 documentary, Sky Line, details how the idea has been taken seriously at the highest levels, and how a lack of the right material—rather than a failure to grasp the science—has been a major sticking point.
Not long before the idea was described in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel, Fountains of Paradise, NASA space scientist Jerome Pearson had suggested it more academically in Acta Astronautica.
A quarter century later, in the early 2000s, physicist Bradley Edwards and space entrepreneur Michael Laine were commissioned by NASA to write a paper examining the technical feasibility of a space elevator.
The Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003 and the global financial crisis that began in 2007 both put dampeners on such left field projects and concepts, but the space elevator idea has begun to gain ground once again.
“I believe the space elevator is inevitable,” Sky Line’s director Miguel Drake-McLaughlin said. “It’s the timing that’s hard to predict, since it requires a major materials breakthrough.”
As graphene and now diamond nanothreads prove, materials science is a field in which things are happening fast.
—–
Feature Image: Thinkstock
Story Image: John Badding Lab / Penn State University
Comments