Everyone wants to escape Earth’s gravity and explore what lies beyond the realms of our planet. However, the cost of this planet escape is extremely high which prohibits all the space travel aspirants from making the big escape. We’ve heard of space elevators that can greatly cut down the cost of space travel but because of lack of strong modern materials, they’re currently not practically feasible. To that end, researchers at Columbia University and Cambridge University have come up with an alternative to the classic space elevator, named the Spaceline.

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The study titled, “the Spaceline: A practical space elevator alternative achievable with current” has been published on ArXiv. Researchers suggest that a line or a traversable cable can be extended, anchored on the moon, to deep within Earth’s gravity, allowing free movement from the vicinity of Earth to the Moon’s surface. With the help of current materials, a cable can be built that extends close to the height of geostationary orbit, helping with easy travel and construction between Earth and the moon. Once in place, it won’t require any advanced and complex rocket for astronauts to explore space and all they'll need to do is reach the end of Spaceline. “If we could design a steady cable, in tension, spanning a region of deep-space, we could move along it with solar power (or any other such source) alone. This can greatly decrease the cost and difficulty of spanning extraterrestrial distances - and is the reason why the concept of the space elevator is seen a major leap in..increasing the access, of human space-travel”, states researchers.

But since these elevators come with their own set of drawbacks, researchers consider Spaceline to be a better option. This is because a cable would only hang onto Earth’s gravitational well, curtailing its any need to be thick or massive. Researchers further state that close to the gravitating bodies, there is a high possibility for micrometeoroids to accumulate which in turn can weaken or break the cable on any major impact. But, the issue can also be circumvented by distributing the tension in the cable across different strands. This could lead to breaking of one or more strands but won’t overall weaken the strength of the cable. Moreover, these broken strands can further theoretically be repaired systematically, just like the small damages to a railway line.

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Currently the Spaceline project is still under development but researchers hope to use it in the future for haulage of small loads to and from the surface of the moon, research centers, and optical telescopes at the Lagrange point base camp.