Japanese company plans to build space elevator by 2050

Japanese construction company, Obayashi, has recently announced that they will build a functioning space elevator by 2050.

The company said that they would build an elevator that would reach 96,000 kilometres into space and if successful it would revolutionise space travel with potentially transforming the global economy, ABC.net.au reported.

Robotic cars powered by magnetic linear motors would carry people and cargo to a newly-built space station, at a fraction of the cost of rockets and it would take seven days to get there.

Using a space shuttle costs about 22,000 dollars per kilogram to take cargo into space but for the space elevator, the estimate was about 200 dollars.

Constructing the space elevator would allow small rockets to be housed and launched from stations in space without the need for massive amounts of fuel required to break the Earth's gravitational pull.

It was also hoped that the space elevator could help in solving the world's power problems, by delivering huge amounts of cheap solar power or storing nuclear waste.