A space elevator to the moon could be doable — and surprisingly cheap

Penoyre and Sandford, a graduate student in astronomy at Columbia University and a co-author of the study, call their lunar space elevator concept Spaceline. Its central element is a cable that would be anchored to the moon and span more than 200,000 miles to a point above Earth’s surface — perhaps an orbit about 27,000 miles from our planet. (The cable of a lunar space elevator couldn’t be anchored to Earth’s surface because the relative motions of the moon and our planet wouldn’t permit it.)

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As explained in the paper, the simplest version of the Spaceline cable might be barely thicker than the lead in a pencil and might weigh about 88,000 pounds — within the payload capacity of a next-generation NASA or SpaceX rocket. It could be made from Kevlar or other existing materials rather than the exotic and hard-to-make carbon-based materials that have long been seen as the key to building a classical space elevator.

Future space travelers would use a spacecraft to fly from Earth to the end of the dangling cable, which would be held taut by Earth’s gravity, and then transfer to solar-powered robotic vehicles that would climb up the cable to the moon. The voyage might take days or weeks. Return trips would simply reverse the process.

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