Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Going Up! Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation on Space Elevator Development

Episode Date: October 3, 2005

The Spaceward Foundation is about to host the first Space Elevator Games. Founder Ben Shelef talks about this and other projects. Q&A on where to look for life in our solar system and a new What's Up space trivia quiz.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Going Up! Space Elevators, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. The Space Word Foundation's project is called Elevator 2010. I'm Matt Kaplan. Downright easy. Engineer and entrepreneur Ben Schelliff is a founder of the foundation, and he's our guest on today's show. Later on, Bruce Betts will weave us a rich tapestry of space milestones and night sky events, and he might even give us the answer to our latest trivia contest. Let's take a minute to review space headlines from the last week.

Bill MacArthur and Valery Tokarev should have arrived at the International Space Station by the time you hear this. The Expedition 12 crew members successfully reached orbit in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, also containing a paying passenger. Gregory Olson is the third space tourist. A final report has been issued on the loss of Cosmos 1, the first solar sail. Yep, it was the Russian Volna rocket. Apparently, the first stage main motor suffered a pump failure. You can read about it at planetary.org.

Our friend Mike Brown of Caltech might have yet another planetary body to name. You may remember his co-discovery of what may be Planet 10, currently about 3 billion miles from the sun. Have we mentioned that he wants to call it Zena? Yes, that Zena. So if Zena had a moon, it would have to be... Gabrielle, right? The International Astronomical Union is considering both selections.

So how does a lonely guy or gal find a little life in this solar system? Emily tells us where to look in this week's Q&A. I'll be back with Ben Schelliff in a minute. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, besides Earth, what are the most promising places to look for life in the solar system? Unfortunately, we don't really know how to look for life that doesn't look like Earth life. We could be looking at it every day and not even recognize it. But we can define a set of criteria that can help us pick places to look.

A living organism is an object that, among other things, is highly ordered, reproduces its own kind, and takes in energy and transforms it to do work. So, to support life, an environment must have an energy source. The sun will do just fine, but so will many dark environments that receive heat from below. There must also be the possibility of complex chemistry. Even the most primitive life on Earth is made of structures composed of complex, highly ordered chemicals. Complex chemistry is aided by solvents that facilitate chemical reactions, so the presence of a liquid is useful. And it helps if the complex chemicals are shielded from harmful solar radiation by an atmosphere. What places in the solar system meet these criteria?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Tune to Planetary Radio to find out. I was in the middle of the Mojave Desert when I first heard about the Spaceward Foundation and their Elevator 2010 project. A small band of true believers was handing out material to the thousands who had come to see Bert Rutan's Spaceship One go into space. It took me a year to invite their founder, Ben Schelliff, to come on the show, but it has been a year of notable successes for the small nonprofit. Much of their current work will climax on the night of October 21st in Mountain View, California.

That's when the first annual Space Elevator Games will host teams of mostly student engineers from around the country. I recently talked with Ben about the upcoming competition and about the Foundation itself. Tell us a little bit about that. What is the mission? The mission of the SpaceWorld Foundation is a general educational space technology advocacy push. Our first project, which is Elevator 2010, is centered around the Space Elevator Project. We're going to talk more about Elevator 2010, is centered around the Space Elevator project. We're going to talk more about Elevator 2010, and in particular, a competition that you guys are putting on in October in Northern California.

What led you to formation of the Spaceward Foundation? When we formed the Spaceward Foundation, it was after we got familiar with the space elevator concept, and it became clear to us that while the technical issues for building the space elevator were real and pretty difficult to solve, the real problem was not so much technical, but that of, I guess, willingness of a nation to embark on something which is bold and daring. You know, in 1960, when President Kennedy, I think it was 1962, when he made his famous speech about going to the moon, technology was not there to support the trip to the moon, yet still he put everything on the line and said, you know, within a decade we're going to be on the surface of the moon.

And when you look about what we can do today, we pretty much, with far better technology, can barely commit ourselves to doing the same thing in a longer amount of time. It seems that this is a symptom of an underlying problem, that there is no motivation to go to space. And Spacewood was founded in order to address this problem. Now, we should clarify that Elevator 2010 is certainly not to imply that you expect there will be a space elevator ready and willing to take people up into Earth orbit by the year 2010. No, it does not.

The reason we had this 2010 deadline was for this is the competition time frame, and what we want to do is we want to push the market or push the level of interest in industry to the point where we can bring the technologies relevant to the space elevator to what NASA would call technology readiness level five, or where all the components are being demonstrated in a lab to a good degree by the year 2010, which means that in the year 2010, you have all your ducks in a row and you can say, okay, now let's go build it. Now, speaking of NASA, you've gotten some support from the space agency. Oh, yeah. NASA has an office called the Centennial Challenges Office.

And these guys, in our view, are just a symbol of everything that's right about NASA. They are taking relatively low amounts of funding and spending them on competitive efforts into sort of high-risk, high-payoff areas, which is what NASA does best. And they partnered with us. They're providing us with right now $400,000 prize purse for competitions on the topic of power beaming and tether strength, which are the building blocks of the space elevator. And this is a relatively low amount if you look at aerospace

budgets, but we think we can take it a pretty long way. Yeah, a very reasonable amount, I would say. As you move in this direction, I mean, you've talked about the two critical technologies that apparently need to be developed. I have to tell you that I've been caught up in the romance of the space elevator ever since reading Arthur C. Clarke's book, of course, Fountains of Paradise, and then more recently, the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, both of whom passed guests on this program. Is that how you ended up getting into this, first of all?

Was it a bit of the romance that came out of those works of science fiction or ones like them? Yeah, I think romance is a weak word here. I was familiar with the space elevator concept from before, but sort of the design that's depicted in Arthur C. Clarke's and the Mars Trilogy's books, this design is for a very futuristic, very heavy space elevator that really is a very distant future project. Oh, I don't know. Three years ago, I happened to come across Brad Edwards' work, which described a space

elevator which weighs about twice as much as a space station. That is a very light design. And reading through the fundamentals, and I'm an engineer by trade, it's no romance. I just fell in love. This made perfect sense. And from that point, you know, I was hooked. Is it because of that work that you folks started, and others, started to look not at some hulking gigantic cable with a circular cross-section,

but a ribbon, and apparently the key to that ribbon being carbon nanotubes? Yep. What Bradley did in his 2001 book, he basically laid the foundation for the modern space elevator. This is very far removed from the science fiction depiction, which is okay. Science fiction always usually errs to the side of grandeur. But what Brad did, he came up... I like sometimes i tell him that you know when history gets written eventually of this area area he'll be remembered as the most influential person of this century

nice compliment yeah given you know if you look at uh say the wright brothers when they were developing their airplane they were one of many there were many other people trying to develop an airplane they just happened to win win. Bradley was all alone. Nobody else was doing the same thing. He came up with something that would end up being the most influential invention in the history of the human race. So you have no doubt that this is going to be the way humankind will eventually reach the edge of space? No doubt is a strong word. I mean, I'm an engineer.

You know what? Maybe it'll never get built. Maybe it just will prove impossible to build, but I don't think so. I don't see any showstopper that's not a simple matter of technology development. And compared to other launch systems, even if everybody delivers what they promise on,

nothing comes close to a space elevator. Well, we will pause for a moment and then talk a little bit more about what the Spaceward Foundation and their project, Elevator 2010, are doing to move us toward a practical space elevator, specifically the competition that is now, as we speak, just a few weeks away. So we will return with Ben Schellef right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's

great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds.

And we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit. And we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in-depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report.

It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio, where our guest is Ben Schelliff. He is an experienced systems engineer, director of engineering, in fact, with a company called Gizmonics Advanced Mechanical Design.

But we're talking about his work on behalf of the SpaceWord Foundation, which he co-founded, and the Space Word Foundation's primary project, Elevator 2010. Ben, we said that we should talk about that competition that's coming up in just a few weeks. Tell us what you're going to be doing up there, and is it in Mountain View, California? Yes, it is. Our competition has two goals to achieve.

One of them would be to just bring the visual side of a space elevator to the public. We have set up a 200-foot tall vertical ribbon on which climbers will ascend. The climbers are being brought by the competing teams, and they are being powered by strong beams of light that will track them all the way up to the top of the ribbon. So our first goal would be just to get a lot of coverage of that and show the public. We think the public has to see space elevators before the public really embraces the concept. And the second would be to just focus academia

and enthusiast mindshare on this problem. And with this, we've succeeded. We've signed a contract for this competition about half a year ago, and we now have eight teams from universities and just enthusiasts building space elevator climbers. We already have 20 teams for next year. And so these are the two goals. So what is your 200-foot ribbon made of? It's actually a commercial product.

The load-bearing core is a carbon fiber-based material, and it has an outer coating of traction material. And you mentioned that these climbers, as they're called, that basically just, most of them apparently just grip the ribbon with just the pressure from rollers, that they are, if not solar-powered, powered by light, photoelectric. Right. That is the basic concept of the modern space elevator design. It's a mechanical climber using basically either pinch rollers or capstan rollers

and powered by a photovoltaic array. We don't use solar power because the solar flux is just not dense enough. So we power it from below by a much brighter beam of light. We use for the competition one of those promotional searchlights you can see sometimes lighting up the sky or emanating from the Luxor in Las Vegas. So that's what we do in the first competition. I guess that makes a good deal more sense. If you were talking about powering a real space elevator with lasers,

you'd probably put them on the ground. Yep, that would be a safer way to go and lighter, too. on the ground. Yep, that would be a safer way to go and lighter, too. So what is the prize in this, what seems to be a miniature version of the X Prize? Maybe you should call it the XX or the Y Prize. Yeah, I think those have been trademarked already. But the prize this year is $50,000 for the climber competition and another $50,000 for the tether competition, which I'll describe in a minute. And next year, we're up another $50,000 for the tether competition, which I'll describe

in a minute. And next year, we're up $250,000. And if nobody wins this year, then it's going to roll over next year, and we're going to have a $200,000 prize purse for each of the tether and beam power competitions. So that's going to be a very nice purse for what could be a group of student engineers representing their university? We believe so. Entering the competition is probably about a $10,000 investment in hardware this year, and we would like to see the same sort of evolutionary track that solar car races underwent,

where the initial solar cars were just really put together for pretty low budgets, and today they're like probably $2 million or fairs, each one of them. We would like to see the same kind of progression. Tell us about the other part of the competition, that tether strength portion. The tether strength is less of a systems engineering task and more of a materials engineering task. The competition is to create the strongest and lightest tether out there. We determine who is the winner by basically pitting the tethers against each other in a tug-of-war, in a real tug-of-war machine that pulls them against each other until one of them breaks.

And the survivors advance to the next round until we have a winner. Is this going to be open to the public? to the next round until we have a winner. Is this going to be open to the public? Yes. We're going to have public viewing. Given that this is not a $10 million scale X Prize event, we're not going to have a big air show type event, but we will publish the details on our website,

and if anybody's interested, it's www.elevator2010.org, just a digit, elevator2010.org just a digit elevator2010.org and we will have details there on how you can view the competition and we will put that website up or that address up on our website at planetary.org where many people may already be listening to this radio program this is the first of these competitions

I believe or has this happened before? no, this is the first time we're doing this 2005 is our first event. The second event, which we're already under contract for and I mentioned, is 2006. And this one is going to be synchronized after the academic year. So it's going to be about July or August. We don't have a firm date yet.

And we're already thinking forward for 2007. Let's go back to some of the technical considerations of doing a space elevator. You said at the beginning of our conversation there are very substantial technical challenges to overcome. I mean, one question I have to ask before you go. How much success has there been so far in linking carbon nanotubes? that there have been so far in linking carbon nanotubes. I guess what I'm getting at is how long a tether or string or whatever has anyone made so far out of carbon nanotubes? The length itself is not the issue.

If you can make a meter, you can make a kilometer, and you can make 100,000 of them. That's not the issue. Once you get to a macroscopic size of a few feet, then you've got it made. In terms of strength, carbon nanotube-based tethers today are stronger than steel, yet not stronger than, say, the best Kevlar-based type material. But this is a very young material. I mean, compared to plastics in their first years,

we're expecting a lot of advancement out of these fibers, as opposed to the existing products, which are all very mature and have done all they can do. Do you want to hazard any kind of a guess as an engineer or as someone who's simply in love with this concept as to when we might actually see a ribbon extending 60,000 miles or so up above the earth? I will say it's about five to ten, but let's say about seven years until you can get the material to work in the lab, which means being pulled to the right tension and in vacuum and radiation and all that good stuff. And beyond that, it's about ten years to construct.

I bet that you've seen the Arthur C. Clarke quote where he originally said he thought it would be about 50 years after people stopped laughing. And I guess just recently he said he may have to revise that to 25. And I believe that if we define people stop laughing to the point where we brought all the basic technologies to what I mentioned before, TRL level 5, then it would be about 10 years to build. or TRL level 5, then it would be about 10 years to build. Because at that point, just the immense promise and strategic importance of the space elevator would become apparent, and it would be a snowball from there. It would be the same as going to the moon or any other national priority project. Well, Ben, we'll leave it at that, and wish you luck with that competition

and with the Spaceward Foundation. And certainly luck to all of the teams who will be competing in October at your Mountain View Space Elevator competition, seeing who can climb the best and who can make the strongest tether. Okay. Thanks so much. It was fun. Ben Schelliff has been our guest. He is a systems engineer, also co-founder of the Spaceward Foundation, He is a systems engineer, also co-founder of the Spaceward Foundation, sponsor of a competition related to their Elevator 2010 project, which will be getting underway later this month. And we will be getting back underway with What's Up and Bruce Betts right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A.

What places in the solar system could support life with energy sources, complex chemistry, liquid environments, and an atmosphere? There are actually only two that totally satisfy this list at present. The trivial case of Earth and Saturn's moon Titan. Titan is too cold for liquid water, but Titan has its own liquid, methane. Methane evaporates, forms clouds, rains, runs off, and seeps into the ground. And Titan has a thick atmosphere and an internal energy source that's causing cryovolcanism. Titan could be the most Earth-like environment in the solar system and a possible

refuge for life. But if you relax the atmosphere requirement, then Mars and Europa become two exciting possibilities. Both clearly have underground reservoirs of liquid water and internal heat sources that have driven geologic activity up until the present. Life could exist in dark, underground refuges on those planets. Finally, there are the unexplored middle atmospheres of the giant planets. Without solid or liquid surfaces, it's hard to imagine how life could evolve there, but the giant planets certainly have plenty of heat, protective atmospheres, and an active chemical stew that could support life if it were there. A bigger question may be whether we can even recognize life that doesn't look like Earth life. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio

at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Back as he is every week to tell us what's up in the sky and to elevate our sights a little bit this week. Enter a bit of culture into our lowly segment. Bruce, welcome back. Thanks, I think. Yeah, absolutely. You betcha.

Lowly segment? And you're welcome. No, I just, you know. All right. Yes, we'll do artistic culture and talk about a tapestry towards Yeah. Lowly segment. And you're welcome. No, I just, you know. All right. In terms of. Yes, we'll do artistic culture and talk about a tapestry towards the end of this segment. But first, let's talk about the tapestry of the night sky. Oh, well put.

Well put. Oh, thank you. In the night sky, if you look in the evening, look at Venus. Still, you can't miss it. It's out there after sunset in the west, looking like a very bright star-like object. After about 9 p.m., look in the east, rising as Mars, or later in the night it'll be high, high in the sky, very bright orangish, brightening through the end of October, looking very cool. And Saturn, if you're up before dawn, is low in the east, and always a great telescope object. Cool stuff.

On to, oh wait, actually, for those listening to this, in areas bordering the Pacific or living even better in the Pacific somewhere, okay, maybe not in the Pacific. Maybe on an island in the Pacific. Or if you're out sailing, there will be a partial lunar eclipse on October 17th, as seen from those areas. Really? Partial eclipse on October 17th, as seen from those areas. Really? Partial lunar eclipse October 17th. Shame we can't tell the people in that show Lost to watch for that.

Maybe they'll catch it anyway. I've been sucked in. I've been watching that show. What else have they got to do? It's true. Except be scared of whatever's attacking them. Run from the others. So anyway, on to this week in space history to try to save our lost show.

On October 6th is the 15th anniversary of the launch of the Ulysses spacecraft, a solar polar orbiter that went out by Jupiter to switch its plane and fly up above the poles of the sun, over the North Pole and below the South Pole, and it's learned all sorts of good stuff about the parts of the sun we haven't been able to see. That's Ulysses. It's still running, isn't it? It is. It's still returning data?

It's still doing great, returning data. I should mention it's a joint ESA-NASA mission. Let's see. We move on to a human spaceflight update. As we record this, we are anxiously awaiting the launch of Expedition 12 to the International Space Station. That will carry Commander William MacArthur and Flight Engineer Valerie Tokarev, as well as spaceflight participant, his official title, Gregory Olson, a paying customer. And it will carry all of them to the International Space Station.

And then MacArthur and Torkareff will spend approximately six months on the space station. They will replace Expedition 11 crew Sergei Krikalev and John Phillips, who have been up there for about six months. And Olson will go up with one crew and come back with the others and spend about ten days in space. I completely forgot that this was a tourist trip. That's our human spaceflight update. Let's move on. Yes. To random spaceflight!

In the Jupiter system. It's better if you can see it, but go ahead. In the Jupiter system. You see sound, don't you? You've been doing this too long. I do. In the Jupiter system, outside the orbit of Callisto, farthest out of the large Galilean satellites, there are several distinct groups of small moons that are in more

eccentric and inclined orbits. That's one random space fact. This week, a bonus. None of these outer moons has ever been imaged by spacecraft, nor have any attended a picnic that I've invited them to. But, you know, lots of imaging from Galileo and Voyager of the Galilean satellites and the intermoons, but not those outer ones because they are just in such funky orbits, little tiny specks. So they've all been caught by Hubble or Keck or something like that.

Yes. Very interesting. Earth-based or earth-orbiting discoveries. Let's go on to the trivia contest. Now, to expand your horizons, increase your culture level, I asked you, what is the name of the famous tapestry that depicts, among other things, the view of Halley's Comet in 1066 A.D.? How'd we do, Matt?

Well, we apparently have a lot of Planetary Radio listeners who must be art historians, or at least they took that required class in college, because they all remembered this tapestry. We were inundated with entries. It was very impressive. We got images of the tapestry in mind. We got people telling us that they'd been to see it, and it's just beautiful. But randomly chosen, randomly chosen now, and this is a good one, our winner for this week, Robert Clark.

Robert Clark, who wrote to us from, you ready for this, the Reagan test site on the Kwajalein Atoll. Nice. Isn't that something? That is something. Now, that's someone who's going to be able to see the partial lunar eclipse. Yeah, so we were talking to you, I guess, Robert. Congratulations. And I don't think I said the answer. The Bayou Tapestry. Not Trappistry. Now that was actually something

used in the Norman conquest. It was made by Trappist monks. Yes, it was. The Bayou Tapestry, which depicts the invasion of what is now the England by the Normans in 1066 and shows the terrible portent of disaster in Halley's Comet hanging out with King Harold. I guess the winner got to interpret the meaning of the comet. I'm thinking, yeah.

Well, it's a nice thing. You can interpret it either way. What do you got for us next week? Well, here's your trivia contest. Not quite as artistic, but just as significant. Which two astronauts have flown in space the most number of times? This is not with each other, necessarily. But which two astronauts have flown in space the largest number of times?

And, hey, let's add on, tell us how many times that is. Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter and win a Planetary Radio T-shirt. And you don't have to be at an island in the middle of the Pacific, but if you are, go for it. Yeah, and tell us how that show in the sky was. Be sure to get that entry to us, though, by Monday, October 10, at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Pacific as in west coast of the United States. 2 p.m., I almost said it wrong, 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Pacific as in west coast of the United States. 2 p.m. I said it wrong. 2 p.m. Pacific time and October 10th.

I'm losing it. You better get us out of here, please. Say good night. Good night, everyone. Hey, everybody, go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about rockets flying overhead. Thank you. Good night.

He's Bruce Batts. He thinks about rockets flying overhead all the time. He's getting some help for that, though. He's here with us every week for What's Up. We'll take another jaunt around the solar system next time. Did you know that Planetary Radio is now heard on about 40 radio stations?

Most of them are listed at planetary.org slash radio. And if you're not near any of them, there's always our podcast and XM Satellite Radio. We try to make finding us at least as easy as, oh, finding Venus. We hope you'll listen in again next week. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week.