Next Floor: Housewares, Bedding, Geosynchronous Orbit

Seattlest's favorite local space elevator company got a straight-faced nod from the Post Intelligencer today in the form of an article in the business section of the paper. The LiftPort Group out of Bremerton is a group of companies working to build a carbon ribbon that will extend from an ocean platform up some 62,000 miles into space where a satellite will anchor it in orbit around the planet. An elevator car will lift materials and people up to the satellite at a fraction of the cost of today's rockets. That's the plan, anyway, and they project its achievement in 2018.

So on Seattlest's 13th anniversary we're planning a day trip into space in celebration. Contributors, mark it on your calendar. Space tourism is one of the applications LiftPort has in mind. Nearly affordable by the super rich space tourism, that is, as opposed to today's price tag in the nearly affordable by the obscenely rich range. Of course, since the price of sending any material into space would be drastically reduced, the elevator would be useful for more than offplaneting rich assholes. Components for a space station, mining operations, communications satellites and all the payloads of your wet sci fi dreams would be zipped up the cable and into orbit.

You can invest, of course, or donate if that's the way you roll. LiftPort isn't relying soley on an internet tip jar to fund this venture, though. They hope that some of their various technology groups will produce sellable results and the seeming success of one of those is the subject of the PI article mentioned above. LiftPort Nanotech Inc. will begin operating a small factory in New Jersey this summer that will produce carbon nanotubes, a substance 60 times stronger than steel and hopefully strong enough to act as LiftPort's 62,000 mile-long kite string. LiftPort is marketing the nanotubes to plastic and glass manufacturers as a way to increase the strength of their products.