Patent grated for 12 mile high inflatable space elevator

You can call it a new era of space transportation in which there will be space elevators to launch astronauts and tourists into orbit.

A Canadian company is taking ideas to a higher plane thanks to a newly granted patent for a “space elevator” that reaches 12.4 miles high and will put cargo and people into space.

The freestanding space tower would stand more than 20 times the height of current tall structures and be used for wind-energy generation, communications and even tourism.

The inventor of the “space elevator” is Brendan Quine, an engineering professor at York University in Toronto and co-founder of Thoth Technology.

According to Extreme Tech, Toth Technology’s tower would be free-standing and would use gas-pressurized cells that essentially create an inflatable skeleton for the massive structure. “From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refuelling and reflight”, said Dr Quine.

“Once built – if built, and if it works – this would seem to offer easier, more routine access to space”.

“Landing on a barge at sea level is a great demonstration”, Caroline Roberts, the company’s CEO said, alluding to SpaceX’s attempts to land a booster rocket on a floating platform off the coast of Florida. He said the team behind the elevator worked on the concept for eight years before securing the U.S. patent in July.

“Other inflated tower designs have been explored previously, but they typically use buttress designs or support cables that we believe [are] impractical”, he said in the CNBC report.

One of the most expensive things about space travel is the cost of fuel, specifically the fuel needed to lift a crazy-heavy rocket and crew capsule off the ground.

It sounds like an idea out of a science fiction novel, but Thoth Technology has been granted a patent for an inflatable, pneumatically pressured tower stretching 12.5 miles high.