(Via The Speculist)

A long interview with Dr. Bradley Edwards, the man who is perhaps most responsible for the recent interest in space elevators. Many thanks to Keith Curtis for going out and getting the story.

This interview is depressing. We haven’t broken ground and it isn’t clear if NASA could be helpful.

From the inside, we’ve got a lot of things going on, even though we haven’t started construction. That book of mine came out a couple of years ago; before that, space elevators were the stuff of science fiction. We’ve gone from science fiction to this idea showing up in a lot of places - various magazines and in real serious discussions in mainstream forums. It’s showing up in high-level discussions at NASA and European Space Agencies and other places like that. We also have a lot of efforts which aren’t solidified yet, but if if any one of of them comes through, we’ll be on a real good track to make this idea happen.

Living in the 21st century, fifteen years just seems too long. It’s like saying that it’s going to take fifteen years to rebuild the Gulf coast after Katrina.

There are limits on how fast you can do things. But if we got more money, it can go faster. I’m a scientist so it’s my nature to be realistic. The project has a couple of years of development and the assumed hurdles with regulatory committees, as well as going out for bids on contracts.

None of that’s engineering though. If you killed all the lawyers and bureaucrats, how long would it really take?

When we’re finished with the development, we would still have some work on the materials yet to complete. If we really pushed everything, we could get it up and running in five or six years. That’s pretty tight. Our estimates are seven or eight years, but if we really pushed it it could happen sooner. It would take a couple of years to build things, and then a couple more to increase the strength of the elevator. But one could use more launches or bigger launches to get a bigger first ribbon to cut back on things a bit. There are things you can do to tighten up the schedule, but I’m trying to be a realist. If you promise something in five years, then five years later you’d better have something. Large infrastructure and power plants take time to get built.

The money will eventually come. With a space elevator, the day you build it and the first elevator you send up, the value of the company will easily become ten times what was put into it, with just the market that’s available; and that’s assuming you don’t do anything intelligent like build the next one at a much lower cost, or develop new commercial applications, etc.

You’re basically saying that if we could launch ten times more stuff into space than we do today, we would still max out that capacity…

Once you’ve got the elevator, you’re able to transport lots of stuff up there. The company that operates the space elevator could then put up the telecommunications satellites, and become the telecommunications owner for the whole planet. Then they could put up solar-power satellites and own the power producing capability for the planet. That’s a ridiculous amount of money and power involved. And if they really wanted to go hog-wild they could say “You know what? We are just going to take Mars! We are the only ones who can get there.” At some point the implications get crazy. So yes, there will be a pretty big return on it once it gets built.