Astronauts would have to fly their rocket into the Spaceline, attach to a solar-powered shuttle and be dragged up to the Moon.
Carbon nanotubes will need to be built on a large scale for the design.
Zephyr Penoyre, one of the Columbia astronomy graduate students behind the Spaceline, told Futurism: The line becomes a piece of infrastructure, much like an early railroad.
Hinted at in a brief tweet on August 28th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX’s massive Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle – set to be the most powerful rocket ever built upon completion – could eventually be followed by a rocket multiple times larger.
SpaceX is currently in the process of assembling the first full-fidelity prototypes of Starship, a 9m (30 ft) diameter, 55m (180 ft) tall reusable spacecraft and upper stage. Two prototypes – Mk1 and Mk2 – are simultaneously being built in Texas and Florida, respectively, while the beginnings of the first Super Heavy prototype has visibly begun to take shape at SpaceX’s Florida campus.
Once complete, Starship’s Super Heavy booster will be the single most powerful rocket booster ever built, standing at least 70m (230 ft) tall on its own and capable of producing as much as ~90,000 kN (19,600,000 lbf) of thrust with 30 250-ton-thrust and 7 200-ton-thrust Raptor engines installed. Assuming 31 throttleable 200-ton Raptors, Super Heavy’s minimum max thrust is a still record-breaking ~62,000 kN (13.7 million lbf).
(SCRUBBED) Watch SpaceX’s Starhopper come alive for the second time, as it attempts a 150 Meter test hover.
A Tesla Roadster launched into space with a spacesuit-clad mannequin at the wheel has completed its first lap of the sun.
SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, was blasted into orbit from Cape Canaveral last year and it is hoped that it will veer close to Mars and Earth during the course of its time among the stars.
According to tracking website Where Is Roadster?, the red sports car has now completed a solar orbit, having been cruising through the void for more than 18 months.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule that set down in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday after having been docked at the International Space Station since late July became the first such vehicle to do three of those trips. SpaceX uses its Dragon cargo capsule to ferry experiment materials, supplies and more to and from the ISS, and it also refurbishes and reflies these capsules when possible as part of its ongoing mission to make spaceflight more reusable, and therefore more economical.
After it splashed down yesterday, SpaceX recovered the capsule from the ocean and returned it to shore. The vehicle is loaded with return cargo from the ISS, with almost 2,700 pounds of materials and results from experiments, which NASA staff on the ground will now examine and study. Dragon carried more than 5,000 pounds of stuff to the Space Station, and over half of that was related to science and research missions. One of the return cargo items is actually a spherical robot called CIMON, and is basically a space-based smart speaker companion.
Police in a small Texas community have recommended that residents temporarily vacate their homes on Monday while Elon Musk 
Elon Reeve MuskUS Space Command: A vision for the final frontier The paradox of superstars Hillicon Valley: US, France reach deal on tech tax | FEC vice chair resigns | Move leaves agency unable to vote on actions | Groups seek net neutrality pledge from 2020 Dems | Australia eyes blocking extremist content MORE ’s SpaceX attempts an experimental launch of a Mars rocket prototype.
A public safety notice was issued to residents of Boca Chica, a town on the southern tip of Texas with houses within two miles of SpaceX’s launch pad for the Starhopper rocket, Business Insider reported on Sunday.
A county sheriff reportedly went door-to-door on Saturday to deliver the notice to approximately 20 households, warning of possible shattered windows and “potential risk to health and safety.”
The #USOpen starts today! Can you imagine a spacecraft the size of a tennis court? To see infrared light from faraway objects, the James Webb Space Telescope needs to be extremely cold! Enter Webb s sunshield (~21x14 meters in size), which will provide shade and keep Webb operating at less than ~50 Kelvin (−370 °F or −223 °C).
A prototype of the Starship spacecraft that SpaceX hopes to one day send to Mars has had its second outing, and a hugely successful one at that. The Starhopper completed its second test hop at the company’s Boca Chica test facility in Texas today, reaching its highest altitude yet before returning safely to solid ground.
A fully developed Starship would offer the carrying capacity needed to deliver dozens of people and cargo to the surface of Mars, though there is a long way to go before that happens.
The program is for now in its early testing phase, with engineers at SpaceX putting a prototype named Starhopper through a series of sub-orbital, up-and-down jaunts to practice their launching and landing chops.
Posted in space travel
It would be much easier to escape Earth’s gravity if you could skip the energy-intensive rockets.
That’s the idea behind the Spaceline, a newly-proposed type of space elevator that would link the Earth and the Moon in a bid drastically cut the cost of space travel.
Described in research published to the preprint server ArXiv by researchers at Columbia University and Cambridge University, the Spaceline would be tethered to the surface of the Moon and dangle down into geostationary orbit around the Earth like a plumb bob, waiting for astronauts to latch on and ride into the cosmos. The proof-of-concept paper found that the Spaceline could be constructed out of materials that exist today, raising the possibility of easier space travel and perhaps even orbital settlements.
