Fans of the Space Elevator (a great Wikipedia entry) concept may be aware of the company LiftPort whose stated goal is to build an elevator to geosynchronous orbit by April 12th, 2018 (they have a counter on their website). LiftPort recently achieved a milestone in development of their technologies with the launch of high-altitude balloons suspending a mile-long tether up which a climber robot rose about 1,500 feet before failing due to problems with nylon gears.
What I found most interesting though was that the LiftPort team is working with the Mars Society to deploy a balloon-borne radio relay at the Mars Desert Research Station in late March. This type of deploy-anywhere temporary radio relay could have real economic value and would be the ideal solution for Mars (which lacks an ionosphere, thus all communications are line-of-sight). While I was at FMARS last summer, our crew commander stressed the importance of this constraint in our simulation. This in some ways severely limited our exploration range. But, learning those lessons is exactly what makes simulated exploration so valuable.
Were planners at NASA aware of this limitation? Most certainly. Did they make plans to circumvent it? Perhaps. But here, along with LiftPort, and Georgia Tech, the volunteer explorers working at the MDRS have found what may be the most viable solution for the problem of mid-range communication on Mars: tethered high-altiude balloons. Even better, they are testing it out for the second year in a row.
Reasonable people can certainly disagree about whether the aims and means of the Mars Society are in the best interest of the entire space community, but this is one more great example of how proactively working towards intermediate goals can really pay off. Another fine example was the Planetary Society’s attempt at a solar sail, and we were all saddened when the bargain-basement rocket they had to launch it on failed. Either way, that project, and those of the Mars Society, are inspirational and successful even in their failures.
I will be covering the space elevator concept quite a bit more over the coming months and years. In a few months, NASA’s second-annual beam-energy climber competition takes place with an even bigger purse ($150,000 this year, up from $50,000 last year), and LiftPort is aiming to test ever longer tethers. Until then, kudos LiftPort, the Mars Society, t/Space, SpaceX, Scaled Composites, Armadillo Aerospace, Planetary Society, and others, for bringing a pioneering prototyping spirit (see this great entry over at Space Pragmatism) back to this reawakening of the Space Age.
Good post! You beat me to the punch on commenting on Liftport’s recent test - I’ve been following them for some time. The MDRS connection is cool too — lots of great connections and I hope synergies emerging from all the various space related projects, public and private.
-Bruce
I agree about how cool the MDRS connection is. I would LOVE to be part of that mission, but alas I’m not a student at GATech, and I don’t have time to go to MDRS this year. A commercialized product is exactly what LiftPort needs, and I think we aren’t alone amoung the space community in wishing them the highest of success.
[…] Over at Anthonares, Anthony Kennedy discusses Liftport and their collaborative efforts with the Mars Society to build a ballon-borne relay. […]