n the 2060s, the 100th anniversary
of the Apollo 11 landing approaches.
And a grand new project is underway
to connect Earth to sky. The Borneo
Tower is a space elevator. It began with a
satellite orbiting the Earth in 24 hours at
an altitude of 36,000km. It was placed in
a geosynchronous orbit, which means it
hovers over the same spot on the equator,
the chosen site being Borneo. Then, a cable
of super-strong materials was dropped
down to the surface, to be used as the basis of an
elevator system, carrying goods and people from
Earth to space and back again. The reduction in costI
of getting cargo into space is huge, but the engineering details
are challenging. The key breakthrough was the successful
development of ‘super-fullerenes’, carbon molecules that offer
cables with high tensile strengths. On Mars, building such an
elevator would be easier because of the planet’s lower gravity.
The Olympus Elevator is already on the drawing board.
Resources from space are brought down the space elevator in
increasing volumes, safely and cleanly, to help the recovery of
Earth’s environment – and, eventually, the preservation of Mars’s.
Meanwhile, the development of an automated industrial
civilisation in deep space continues. With self-replication and
AI technologies rapidly advancing, a new generation of probes- themselves built by earlier probes – is pushing further out:
to the ice giants, into the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, and soon SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, NASA
P
ar
tF
ive
The
Decade (^) of (^) C
on
ne
ct
io
n
(^206)
(^0) – 2069