Changing the face of space travel one floor at a time

The dream of space travel likely goes back to a couple of cavemen lying on the ground, shooting the breeze after a tough day, and gazing up at all those little objects we now call stars and planets flickering and flitting across the sky.

We keep getting closer and closer to going farther and farther.

Now, a Canadian company wants to change the face of space travel by throwing elevator into mix–an elevator 20 kilometres high. That’s 20 times times taller than the current highest man-made structure, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai.

Thoth Technology of Pembroke Ontario was granted a U.S. patent last month for the technology and is moving full steam ahead toward creating the free-standing space elevator tower which could be used for launching payloads, tourism, observation, scientific research and communications.

Landing at 20 kilometres above sea level will make space flight more like taking a passenger jet,” says Thoth President and CEO Caroline Roberts.

Thoth’s chief technical officer and the inventor of the project is Brendan Quine, an Associate Professor of Space Engineering and Planetary Physics at York University in Toronto.

Quine says the goal is the capacity to launch a single stage space plane directly into low orbit and return it to the top of the structure without the need of expendable rockets.

Quine, who emmigrated from Britain to Canada in 1997, is a dynamo.

During his doctoral research at Oxford, he developed and patented an autonomous star tracker for attitude determination and spacecraft navigation, recently launched on the European spacecraft, PROBA.

Besides Thoth’s space elevator, he is currently developing a mission to Mars called Northern Light that will explore new regions of the planet.

As part of that mission he recently spent his sabbatical year establishing the mission’s ground station at the Algonquin Radio Observatory.

He joined RCI by from from the Observatory to talk about the space elevator.

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