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Space engineers have suggested putting a satellite into an orbit that stays over a single point on Earth (geostationary orbit) and running a cable down to Earth. The satellite holds up the cable, which would have to be of enormous strength to avoid snapping. Carbon nanotubes are the material of choice.

One catch is that geostationary orbits require putting the satellite more than 35,000 kilometres high.

Quine suggests going only 20 km up — not to space, but up where the air is very thin. And he would inflate his kevlar tower to keep it up. He proposes a trial tower 1.5 km high before the 20-km version.

“Most conventional rockets fly vertically for the first 15 or 20 kilometres and then they bank and drop a stage,” Quine said. “You drop all this very expensive hardware in the oceans.” He wants to “nix that part and start at 20 km,” taking off horizontally toward low Earth orbit.

This saves money, fuel, and possibly lives. A rocket with fewer stages is less likely to explode. And the dense air at low altitude causes drag and violent shaking.

(Some scale may help here. Mount Everest is about 8.8 km high. An aircraft at 35,000 feet is 10.67 km high, so the elevator would be about twice as tall.)

Quine and his wife, Caroline Roberts, are in this together. They met at Oxford University where he was in engineering and she was a Canadian on a Rhodes Scholarship doing a PhD in English literature and cultural history.

Photo by Jason Gordon, handout photo / Ottawa Citizen

Together they founded Thoth Technology Inc., which builds space hardware. He’s the chief science officer and she’s the president. You can buy one of their fancy cameras for $50,000 and up, as well as a miniature spectrometer, an instrument that satellites and probes to other planets use to analyze materials that they can’t bring back on Earth.