Who Will Win The Space Race?

We are all quite familiar with Jeff Bezos’s mega-company, Amazon. However, we may not all know about Mr. Bezos’s second company, Blue Origin. Found in 2000, the aerospace company was a virtually invisible company up until recently. In 2015, Blue Origin successfully launched its rocket, the New Shepard, into space without losing any of its parts. This company boasts the New Shepard’s fully reusable system, which ultimately reduces the cost of manufacturing a new rocket. Mr. Bezos has big plans for his company, and he wants to use his rockets as a way to shift heavy manufacturing to sites elsewhere in the solar system to allow the Earth to return to a more natural state. When asked if there were better ways of space travel than rockets powered by expensive, inefficient chemical reactions, Mr. Bezos concluded that there were none.

Tokyo-based Obayashi Corporation has a different approach to this space travel problem. Rather than dedicating money and time to rocket manufacturing and researching, this company is working to build a ‘space elevator’ that would allow people to glide up to space stations. If this plan comes to fruition, the project is predicted to finish by 2050.

Up until now, these so called ‘space elevators’ only existed in sci-fi and fantasy. After all, the idea itself seems impossible. An elevator to space? What will the cables be made of? How long will it have to be? What if it breaks? Although the company has not released much information regarding the manufacturing process of the elevator, it has said that they will be creating the cables out of a material called carbon nanotube. Carbon nanotube is a cylindrical-shaped material made up of chains of carbon, and each strand is a couple of nanometers in diameter. These structures are at least 100 times stronger than steel, and yet they are only a sixth as heavy. Carbon nanotube technology is still in its experimental stage, but it clearly has the capability of serving as the cables for these space elevators.

The Obayashi space elevators will connect several space stations located thousands of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The elevators will be moving at a speed of 200 kilometers per hour, so the entire trip to the space stations will take a little over a week. From these space stations, passengers will be able to take trips to the moon or Mars, a voyage that will take six to ninth months. The entire project is expected to cost ten trillion yen, which is roughly $9.2 trillion US dollars.

Companies around the world are showing very promising technological achievements in space travel and voyaging. SpaceX is another relatively famous company that is working to create highly efficient rocket technology. It will be interesting to see which technology prevails in this furious space race.