New life for LiftPort?

In his post “A Boost from Balloons?” on his Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle details the possibilities that LiftPort may have in using it’s Tethered Tower application to stay afloat (pun intended).  Alan talks about his conversations with LiftPort’s Michael Laine and their latest demo (the preparation of which was described somewhat painfully here).

LiftPort/Tethered Towers may have one or more potential customers for this product and that may be enough for them to stay solvent and continue on their quest to build a Space Elevator.  Let’s hope so…

4 thoughts on “New life for LiftPort?

  1. Darnell Clayton

    That is great news to hear!

    I swear, if Michael makes it out of this scrap (and eventually builds the SE), you’ll be seeing his story featured on the Solar History Channel: Tonights Viewing, how the Solar System was won.

  2. Michael Laine

    well, we are not out of the woods, yet. but at least i can see that we are in a ‘clearing’ and the woods seem to be thinning out a bit. we DONT have a customer – yet. but two things that you absolutely must have in order to build an Elevator to Space is: Courage and Optimism…

    So, we still have about 40 days before the Sept deadline… and i am a lot happier than i have been in months. it has not been easy, but things are getting better by the day.

    thanks for the continued interest and support.

    take care. mjl

  3. Arigato Mister Roboto

    Whoa, let’s not get overenthusiastic. LiftPort may some day be responsible for making SE posssible, and could make Michael very rich in the process through enabling technologies, but the likelihood of a private company being capable of building this thing is essentially nil. Even if they had the money, which is bound to be somewhere in the 11-figure to 12-figure range, no business could assume that much risk. Insurance would be utterly impossible to obtain, no matter how well developed the constituent technologies are, and no board of directors would ever approve risking that much money on a radical engineering project whose success rests on unknown unknowns.

    That means you need a government or group thereof to build it, which means the technical and economic decisions become subordinate to politics. And that in turn means order-of-magnitude bloating of cost, doubling or tripling of construction timelines, vast corruption in the contracting selection process, and political decisions undermining the feasibility and purpose of the project like with the Shuttle. Cancellation of the program in any given country would be a constant threat and a high likelihood over the project’s lifetime, meaning the remaining partners must then agree to pay even more for a system their own decisions have made increasingly dubious. Leaders on both extremes would call it a far-fetched boondoggle, and leap on every launch failure, ribbon break, cost overrun, criminal misconduct by subcontractors, and schedule delay to press their case. In the best of all possible worlds, you might end up with a few-inch ribbon going up to a small satellite, with small climbers able to take up 1-kg payloads at a few kilometers per hour….in 2050. And if the ribbon breaks once the system is operational, Game Over. But if it doesn’t, and functions acceptably for a few decades, then you might convince the partners to widen it or build a bigger one. Perhaps with a per-vehicle payload capacity of 10 kg. Figure human-capable systems are attempted around 2130 or later.

  4. Brian

    no business could assume that much risk. Insurance would be utterly impossible to obtain,

    Some investigation on our part has shown this is not so.

    no matter how well developed the constituent technologies are, and no board of directors would ever approve risking that much money on a radical engineering project whose success rests on unknown unknowns.

    The key here is incremental steps. At no point are we going to launch into the vast unknown, gambling on unknown unknowns. The plan is for an incremental process, each succeeding step building on what has come before.

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