Want to ride an elevator to space? New breakthrough could make it possible

A Japanese construction company, Obayashi Corporation, has been investigating the concept for a space elevator. Courtesy: Obayashi Corp.

Want to ride an elevator into space? While the idea has been around for more than 100 years, a breakthrough in nanotechnology could mean we will be riding into space on a cable made of diamonds.

Scientists at Penn State University in the US released a research paper last month that showed the way forward to producing ultra-thin diamond nanothreads that have a strength and stiffness greater than that of todays strongest nanotubes and polymers.

John Badding, professor of chemistry at Penn State University, said his team had made the breakthrough while examining the properties of benzene molecules and that it took 18 months of study to make sense of what the team had been seeing.

It is as if an incredible jeweler has strung together the smallest possible diamonds into a long miniature necklace, Badding said. Because this thread is diamond at heart, we expect that it will prove to be extraordinarily stiff, extraordinarily strong, and extraordinarily useful.

Benzene breakthrough

The experiments involved putting benzene a liquid under compression to form a solid material.

What we found was that because our experiment compressed the benzene much more slowly than had been done before, these new materials formed, he said.

Everybody thought that the benzene molecules would link together in a way that was very disorganized, like a glassy amorphous material.

Instead, what caught our attention was that our experiments told us there was order in the benzene and that was the shock, he said.

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Want to ride an elevator to space? New breakthrough could make it possible

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