• Question: how many people does it take to make the elevator to space?

    Asked by saraw to Sinead, Jessamyn, Eleanor, Chris, Adam on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Jessamyn Fairfield

      Jessamyn Fairfield answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      It took thousands of people to build the space shuttles that NASA used for the last thirty years. Building a space elevator would be tricky in the same way, where it’s very important to get each part engineered exactly right, but in the end everything has to fit together. So we can guess that it would also take thousands of people to build a space elevator.

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      Making an elevator to space out of people, there’s an interesting idea!

      Well let us see:
      – if we use only tall people and say they are all 2 metres tall
      – and we accept that space starts at the Kármán line which is 100 km (100,000 metres) above sea-level
      – but we want an elevator, not a ladder, so we need to make a box of people stretching up all that way

      So we’ll say it takes 16 people to make the box (4 on each side) and 50,000 of those boxes stacked on top of each other to reach outer space…*calculating*…

      800,000 people to make an elevator that reaches space.

      They will of course be very cold and unable to breathe so we’ll have to provide oxygen tanks to people above 8 kilometers (like climbers on Everest) and warm jackets for all. On the bright side as we get further from Earth the gravity gets weaker and people can get up to 3% taller near the top of the pile, so we might not need quite so many! The ones at the bottom will definitely be crushed.

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