A Canadian space firm is just another step closer in revolutionizing space travel with a simple idea. The idea is to take a giant elevator into space instead of taking a rocket ship.
Thoth Technology Inc has been granted both patents from US and UK for a space elevator that is designed to take astronauts up into the stratosphere, to drive them into space.
The company in a statement said that the tower, named the ThothX Tower, will be an expansive, standing structure with a complete electrical elevator that will reach 12.5 miles (20 kms) above the Earth.
Brendan Quine is the tower’s inventor. He said in a statement, “Astronauts would ascend to 20km by electrical elevator. From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refueling and reflight.”
Normally, regions above 31 miles in height can be reached only through rocket ships, where a large body is expelled at a high velocity to achieve push in the opposite direction. Quine said in the patent that rocket launching is inefficient and while a space elevator would take less energy.
In the patent, Quine explained that rocket ships use up more energy because they have to counter the gravitational force during the flight by carrying mass in the form of propellant and must overcome atmospheric pressure.
On the other hand, an elevator system, “work is done less relatively as no mass must be expelled to do work against gravity, and lower scaling speeds in the lower atmosphere can effectively eliminate atmospheric pull”.
