They knew at the time it would be a gamble and the clock was ticking.
A blue-collar community in New Jersey put $100,000 on the table in 2005 and hoped it would be the springboard that would send elevators — full of payloads, and eventually people — to space. And they’d be at the epicenter of it all.
LiftPort — a Washington-based company, with an ambitious goal of sending the “first lift" off Earth by April 12, 2018 — announced plans nearly 15 years ago to open a factory in Millville that would produce part of the technology needed to make it happen.
It never did.
While CEO Michael Laine is still part of the space race to pursue an elevator concept — he said he’d likely “do it, and talk about it later” rather than announce plans ahead of time — the city, a Cumberland County agency, and later, nearly 3,500 people who invested in Laine’s second elevator attempt, wonder where we’d be today if the project took off.
Getting off the ground
LiftPort was founded in 2003 and a year later, the company began running a number of tests toward the goal of making an Earth elevator, including launching a 1,000-foot balloon with a tether that had a robot climb up it.
But to stretch to space and be able to carry any significant weight, they needed the right material for a tether. One of the major components that LiftPort planned to use were carbon nanotubes, a composite material that is lighter than fiberglass, but could be up to 100 times stronger than steel, the company said.
But where would they produce them?
In April 2005, LiftPort announced plans to open a facility in Millville that would also serve as the company’s regional headquarters. The Cumberland County city was chosen due to its manufacturing history and central location on the East Coast.
The facility, which would have been named LiftPort Nanotech, would create carbon nanotubes that initially would be sold to other companies and used in their products to make them stronger — like, plastic, metal and glass, which Millville is well-known for.
By selling the nanotubes, LiftPort would raise capital to continue funding research and development.
Don Ayers, who served as the director of economic development in Millville from 2001 to 2011, said he met with Laine and professors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to see the machine that would help develop the nanotubes. Everyone was optimistic, he said.
“We had a downturn in some of our businesses (in Millville) but we were moving back up at the time,” Ayers said. “We thought getting into a new material such as carbon nanotubes would be a move that was worthwhile, even though we knew how much of a risk it was because of how new it was.”
The idea was well liked by the Cumberland County Empowerment Zone and the city of Millville so much that in 2005, each entity offered $50,000 in seed money. LiftPort planned to lease space at 22 Airwork Street, close to the Millville Airport.
“We always knew it was going to be risky,” Ayers said. “But, given the prospects for the future and having spent a full day talking to the people at NJIT about the prospects for it, we figured it was worth it.”
However, the plant never moved forward.
“We couldn’t mass produce the nanotubes,” Laine said in a recent interview with NJ Advance Media.
A Boston-based company that it contracted to build nanotube furnaces ran behind schedule and defaulted on their agreement with LiftPort, Laine explained in a newsletter in 2007.
Then, the economy crashed, Laine lost his Washington state property and LiftPort went out of business.
“We didn’t quit,” Laine said. “We were forced to stop which is a big difference in perspective.”
That wasn’t the last time New Jersey or the science community would hear from Laine. Five years later, LiftPort 2.0 surfaced.
After conducting some research and finding that a lunar elevator could be created with materials and technology available to make it more feasible to do than in 2005, Laine restarted LiftPort. He created a Kickstarter campaign detailing the company’s current and future goals with a fundraising goal of $8,000. The first step was to build a robot that would climb 2 kilometers into the sky, to a platform of high-altitude balloons tethered to the ground.
Ultimately, 3,468 people backed the project and contributed $110,353, more than 13 times more than what was the company looking to raise.
One of the people who backed the Kickstarter was New Jersey native Nicholas Hillman.
A long time space enthusiast, Hillman said he would visit the observatory at Washington’s Crossing with his father and attend monthly meetings at the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton to listen to NASA employees and other science community members talk about their work. It was at a 2005 meeting where he heard Laine speak about the space elevator.
“I met him in person once, and It felt reputable backing it because I knew him from his in-person appearance, and he spoke to a whole bunch of other astronomers,” Hillman said. “The idea of a space elevator is wonderful, and I remember everybody liked it back then. I was 15, so I didn’t know as much as I do now, but it just seemed cool at that time.”
Hillman began following the LiftPort Facebook page and joined a group looking to bring awareness of the project. But he started to get worried when the updates on the Kickstarter did not come as often and eventually stopped.
“A lot of people were frustrated,” Laine said of the Kickstarter initiative. “I didn’t have the team. We did build the robot, but unfortunately, it didn’t work. It was a frustrating experience.”
Laine still goes out every once in a while and does lectures on space elevators, as well as some consulting. He still believes there is a chance there could be a lunar elevator.
“I think it’s real,” he said. “That is my primary focus. I think there is something there. I’m not doing it in the same way as I did the Earth elevator. I’m going to do it, and talk about it later. I think there is something there and I am still pursuing it.”
Once thought to be a far-fetched idea, space elevators are becoming a reality. Last fall, a Japanese construction firm and Shizuoka University sent a smaller scale elevator to the International Space Station, where a small box climbed along a 30 foot cable between two satellites.
The experiment “will fulfill a necessary engineering test along the way to space-elevator operations, even this early in the mega project called the Space Elevator,” said Pete Swan, president of the International Space Elevator Consortium.
And do not rule out Millville for future production and manufacturing sites.
“The people in Millville were great,” the LiftPort co-founder stated. “From city council to economic development, it was good. I would still set something up in Millville if I had an operation to set up.”
This article is part of “Unknown New Jersey,” an ongoing series that highlights interesting and little-known stories about our past, present, and future -- all the unusual things that make our great state what is it. Got a story to pitch? Email it to email@example.com.