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Space Elevator Company LiftPort In Trouble
TropicalCoder writes "The LiftPort Group, founded four years ago with the lofty dream of building a stairway to heaven, has seemingly reached the end the line. The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit. Elevator cars would be robotic 'lifters' which would climb the ribbon to deliver cargo and eventually people to orbit or beyond. Now LiftPort has all but run out of funds, and the State of Washington's Securities Division has entered a Statement of Charges (PDF) against LiftPort Inc. dba LiftPort Group and founder Michael Laine."
I was pretty much convinced the space elevator was never going to happen with our current understanding of material technology anyway. There was a study in Nature a while back by Nicola Pugno who pointed out that defects in carbon nanoribbon would pretty much make it impossible. You need 62 gigapascals of tension strength for a space elevator. Carbon nanoribbon gives you 100 gigapascals. First, note how slim that margin is, and that's with PERFECT nanoribbon. But perfection is difficult to achieve in the real world, and inevitable atomic defects reduce the strength of the ribbon dramatically. Just a single atom defect in a single strand reduces strength by 30%. Bulk material consisting of many strands reduces that even further.
I can't find the original article, but here's a typical write-up at the time.
Who knows, maybe somebody will invent something better than carbon nanotubes, but even a perfect ribbon has a mighty slim margin.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
They weren't going to just build a space elevator, much of the technology that they were developing was also going to be licensed off. They weren't just about the end-game. Like many companies with long term goals, they fund their R&D by licensing their past R&D.
I sig, therefore I am.
Hundreds of breakthroughs? You're clearly speaking ignorance out of your ass, not having bothered to catch up with the work already put into this.
/can/ be manufactured and simply need to evolve that capability.
Just because nobody built a submergeable car doesn't mean that building one requires a breakthrough. The technology for building one is readily available if you hire some engineers and throw the associated requirements at them, it's just that nobody bothered making one yet as nobody yet has found the need.
This goes for the second and third elevator challenges - climber and powerbeaming. No fundamental breakthroughs are required.
Tether is another matter. Let me put some numbers for you:
I don't know what Laine was doing in the last 4 years, but I've always doubted he'd be able to come up with anything more than nice marketing material. He just never seemed anywhere on-par, resourcewise, with other parties interested in the same nanotech, be it for elevator purposes or not. (I think I was a bit humbled a while back when I read a few articles about huge Japanese companies buying SWNT patents and investing billions in future mass-prodction of the above).
However, what you do have is:
1. Very long and imperfect SWNT's that give tensile strengths marginally better than existing high-strength composites.
2. Very short SWNT's that have been measured to have a tensile strength of ~60GPa. Theoretical is ~300GPa (for a theoretically unlimited length fiber).
Now, you don't build a composite out of these alone. Spinning a cable means connecting SWNT molecules using weak non-covalent bonds (pi and Van Der Waals), meaning the end result carries only a fraction of the strength of the SWNT's you use.
You need to attain a cable that can do ~100GPa, or ~50GPa is also fine if you're ok with using an order of magnitude more material. Neither is unfeasible.
To oversimplify a bit, there are three relevant pursuits here -
a. Manufacture higher quality SWNT's (whether in the short&strong or long&weak camps or any camp in between)
b. Retain the highest N% of the orininal strength as you weave SWNT's from camp X into sheets that can spread load. (Over the past decade or so, X was slowly progressing towards the short&strong camp), while N was also increasing steadily.
c. Ramp up manufacturing capacity of SWNT's by orders of magnitude. (in as far as we care about, of camp X SWNT's, but since tomorrow camp Y may perform better in [b] than camp X today, overall increase in SWNT production capability, thus making SWNT costs cheaper, is crucial.
So what do we have? A static red line that needs to be crossed as a result in development of [a] and [b], and possibly the radical lowering of the red line with enough progress in [c].
Where are we today? ~3GPa cables. Google Elevator2010. Nasa's offering some hard cash if you can come up with better in its annual competition (purse for this year's elevator challenges is 1M$)
This is hardly hundreds of breakthroughs, especially as we already KNOW what the molecules we need look like, have proved they
It's totally something we don't know how to do yet, but in light of nanomechanics, evolving atomic assembly technologies, ever improving chemistry etc, it's not unreasonable to assume these will be met in the foreseeable future, just as it is not unreasonable to believe 10 Terabyte 3.5'' harddrives will be made, even though nobody knows how to make them today. An elevator would be "something we can build once the SWNT equivalents of 50 Terabyte harddrives can be built".
We can of course argue that every insight an engineer has as to how to evolve the technology a bit further (how to make 1.2 TB harddrive instead of existing 1TB ones) is a "breakthrough", but that would be a pointless semantic debate.
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right!
c e to get an idea of our commercialization efforts. we will be doing a pretty bold experiment within the next month, and start rolling out our first product.
we have been working on several research projects that were - and are - commercially feasible: carbon nanotubes, solar panel technology, lasers and most recently, balloon-based, high-altitude systems for communications, observation and weather monitoring.
look up our youtube site http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ElevatorToSpa
thanks for your interest in the project, i appreciate your continued support.
take care. mjl
michael laine
president, liftport group.
you are wrong in your application of blue sky laws (other posters are right, sorry)
however you nailed it with this part:
"seems to stem from his lack of registering with the State that he would be selling securities."
that is exactly what happened. i gave the documents to the individuals, but not to the state. i thought i was covered under Reg D, as i was only asking for $500k and that i could work with unaccredited investors. so far as i know, and i think the state agrees, that part is true. what i didnt know, was that i had to file with the states, too. under Reg. D, you dont need to file with the feds. since it was a federal exemption, i thought i also excepted me from the individual states as well. i found out - much to my embarrassment, anger and frustration, that i was wrong. it came down to not filing in the state... for which i have to pay a penalty.
but lets keep it in perspective here - its 'only' a $2ok fine. if i had done something really 'bad', that would have been much much much stiffer.
and no, so far as i know, i dont have any angry investors - anywhere. it is a paperwork snafu, and nothing more.
thanks for actually taking the time to read and understand the documents. most people on slashdot are not bothering to do that.
take care. mjl
michael laine
liftport group.