Three months ago, the Liftport Group was sinking fast. The company’s founder, Michael Laine, lost his headquarters and was talking about shutting down and ending his dream of building the elements for a space elevator. Laine still isn’t out of the woods, but today he says he’s on the verge of a business deal that could revive the dream, based on Liftport’s work with balloon-borne platforms for communications and surveillance. Could the balloon business keep LiftPort aloft long enough to get to space by 2031?
LiftPort has certainly had its ups and downers: In April, Laine was saying that he was running out of cash and had to start bringing in $25,000 a month by Sept. 1 to keep the doors open.
Laine's eventual goal is to develop the technologies for constructing the first space elevator - a ribbon of super-strong material extending from Earth's surface thousands of miles into space. Robotic crawlers would rise on that highway to the sky, bringing payloads into orbit for a fraction of the current cost.
The technology for actually doing that isn't nearly ready for prime time. Who knows, maybe it never will be. But LiftPort plans to capitalize on the intermediate technological steps - by building the crawlers and tethered aerial platforms for more terrestrial-minded applications, and by perfecting the process for manufacturing carbon nanotube ribbons.
The plan hasn't always gone the way Laine hoped. In fact, LiftPort is facing legal action in New Jersey over a promised nanotube factory, and in Washington state over alleged lapses in financial disclosures (PDF file). And then there was that running-out-of-money issue.
Looking back, Laine sees his troubles in April as the low point in LiftPort's saga. He soldiered on, however, in hopes of making the aerial platform commercially viable and digging himself out of his financial hole. Laine has said more than once that a sister company called Tethered Towers could take the balloon-based system to the next leve.
With the Federal Aviation Administration's go-ahead, Laine and his team staged a tethered balloon test on June 28 near Bremerton, Wash., where the company is still based.
"We definitely had the worst weather we've ever experienced," Laine recalled. He said winds gusted to around 25 or 30 mph - which is never a good thing for balloons. The tethers holding the balloons down bent into the wind at a scary angle.
"We deployed [the tethers] out to 1,000 feet, but we were probably only about 600 feet high in the air," Laine said. "We were supposed to go up to 2,000 feet."
Even though Laine wasn't happy with the demonstration, his potential clients seemed impressed that the system could take the stress. "Actually, having the really bad weather wasn't much fun for my team and me, but it went a long way toward building the credibility of our system," he said. "In a way, I guess it turned out to be a good day."
So good that Laine thinks at least one of the clients will come to the rescue.
"I've got four people I'm talking to right now as potential customers," he said. "Any one of them will be good. Two or three of them will put us in great shape. And I think that's just the beginning. I think we're going to be OK."
Laine declined to go into the detailed applications envisioned by his potential customers - or, more accurately, his potential strategic partners. But he said the business model called for balloon-borne platforms capable of staying up for three to 10 days. Such platforms could be used for aerial wireless communications during an emergency, or for aerial monitoring of a particular area.
"For example, if you want to monitor bison migration in Wyoming, you put a balloon up there and you can watch what's going on," he said. "We've talked about border security, things like that. ... We can't tackle all of [the potential applications], so what we're trying to do is find partners. Each of them have their own markets, they're not overlapping."
Laine pointed to Tokyo's planned 2,001-foot-high communications tower as the kind of job LiftPort's platforms could handle on a backup basis. "This should not be your primary system, but it augments your current system," he explained. "It should be part of your bag of tricks."
But even if LiftPort brings in new partners, the legal problems still have to be settled. The lawsuit filed by the city of Millville, N.J., is "definitely a serious concern," Laine told me.
As part of an urban development deal, Millville went in on a $100,000 loan to LiftPort that was meant to fund the carbon nanotube factory. Although LiftPort did start manufacturing nanotubes, "we were just not able to make them in the quantities that we expected to," Laine said.
"We didn't complete our end of the deal," he acknowledged. "They have an obligation to file suit. We have an obligation to pay back the money or put a factory out there. We're not in a position to do either one right now. ... There's no question [the factory] is going to be there, it just isn't there yet."
So Laine is waiting for the wheels to turn on the New Jersey lawsuit - and the same could be said about the fines he's facing in Washington state ($10,000 for himself, and $10,000 for LiftPort) for failing to disclose enough information about LiftPort's investment risks. "Ultimately, what it comes down to is that I did the paperwork wrong ... It's not like you can avoid paying this stuff. If you screw up, you've got to pay for it," he said.
Sometimes it sounds as if the criticism Laine has been facing - on Slashdot and from some quarters of the space elevator community - stings more than the prospect of fines. "Those guys really vilified me, which wasn't fun," he said today. (Slashdot later posted an item providing Laine's side of the story.)
For the most part, Laine is focused on what's ahead, and he promises that things will soon be looking way, way up. In the meantime, here are a few other blips on the radar screen for fans of space elevators and high-flying balloons:
