The Central Conceit

Brian Dunbar at Liftport send me over a copy of a book they're working for review, and I, for my part, am going to blog my comments. Liftport is a private company working to build a Space Elevator as a cheap, high tech access to space.

So I got a copy, opened it and immediately looked for the section I care the most about: does the physics of this work? Every story I've ever read on this technology (and there is lots, all well documented in the book) has as it's central conceit, some kind of fudge about the strength of materials involved, i.e. diamond hyper- filament, electrosupported nanocarbon tubes, carbon re-enforced Unobtainium etc. Without some really solid physics backing the engineering, this falls into the bin of Things-I'd-Like-to-See-But-Can't-Happen, like a moonbase or a secular government.

But wait, your saying to yourself, wouldn't most people say, "they are a funded company. Surely smarter, better people than you, say actual, factual certified engineers, have worked this out already. Isn't this just your usual physicist-arrogance. If they have raised money, surely the market has validated the approach. What’s wrong with you that you don’t believe anything?"

Most people would say that, but then, most people didn't work for CertCo.

I raised $35M for CertCo in the last year of the company, and now I've been on the other side of funding decisions. While I don't know what Due Diligence was done for the Liftport folks(likely lots), my experiences have me questioning business plan central conceits. Most people *want* these things to work badly enough to … overlook some of the red flags. Maybe they are really yellow. Maybe some breakthrough will happen etc. Don’t know that this happened here (and given this is hardware not software I suspect the level of DD is an order of magnitude higher), but that’s my concern since I also want this to work. The chapter is very well written and comes with it’s own fairly skeptical caveats as well. Very well done.

So this weekend I find myself re-learning some of the stuff I failed to learn around materials science (I got a C+ at Penn State) and, not having access to Mathematica, I am looking things up in The Russians.

In other words, I'm having the best time I've had in months. Thank you very much Brian! I'm rooting for this to work out.