Daily Archives: July 28, 2010

LiftPort and the Lunar Space Elevator

With all of the work I’ve been doing as President of ISEC, I’ve neglected my Space Elevator Blog a bit – I’m now making a concerted effort to catch up…

Michael Laine of LiftPort fame has a new project; trying to convince people that building a Lunar Space Elevator is a good idea and doable with today’s technology and materials.

He’s hosting a four day event/workshop in downtown Seattle, Washington, starting on Thursday, July 29th.  Details can be found here.

There is also an article about this effort in Universe Today which you can find here.  As you read the article, you find that this seems to be more of a thought-experiment than a serious proposal.  But he would like to make this work, no doubt about it…  Money quote from the article:

Laine started a space elevator company in 2003, LiftPort, which fell to financial problems in 2007. He sees the lunar elevator as a possible rebirth for the company, which once had 14 full-time employees. “This is a renaissance project, a rising again,” he said. “I’m applying a lot of what I learned on the Earth elevator to this new vision. While tackling the Earth elevator, all my money came from real estate, and I had plenty of money for my needs. But this time is different. For us to build this thing we are going to have to earn our way.”

“But I think it could be phenomenally lucrative, too,” Laine continued. “We are going to make discoveries along the way that will lead to products and services that are not related to going to the Moon. We think there is a solid value proposition as part of this.”