Engineering

• Using Claude to Think Through a Space Elevator

  When I say I wanted to understand the engineering problems behind building a space elevator, I mean I really wanted to dig in. Not just read about it. I wanted to work through the challenges, piece by piece, with actual math backing things up.

  So I decided to see what Claude and I could do with this kind of problem.

  Setting it Up

  I have an Obsidian vault that Claude Code/CoWork has access to, and I started by asking it to help me understand the core challenges of building a space elevator. First things first: clearly state all the problems. What are the engineering hurdles? What makes this so hard?

  From there, I started asking questions. Could we use an asteroid as the anchor point and manufacture the cable in space? How would we spool enough cable to reach all the way down to Earth? Would it make more sense to build up from the ground, down from orbit, or meet somewhere in the middle?

  I’ll admit I made some mistakes along the way. I confused low Earth orbit with geostationary orbit at one point but Claude corrected me and explained the difference. That’s part of what makes this approach work. You’re not just passively reading; you’re actively thinking through problems and getting corrected when your mental model is off.

  Backing It Up With Math

  Here’s where it got really interesting. I told Claude: don’t just describe the problems. Prove them. Back up every challenge with actual math and physics calculations.

  I also told it not to try cramming everything into one massive document. Write an overview document first, then create supporting documents for each problem so we could work through them individually.

  So Claude started writing Python code to validate all the calculations. I hadn’t planned on that initially, but once it started writing code, I jumped in with my typical guidance. Use a package manager, write tests for all the code.

  What we ended up with is a Python module covering about 12 of the hardest engineering challenges for a space elevator. There’s a script that calls into the module, runs all the math, and spits out the results. It’s not a complete formal proof of anything, but it’s a structured way to think through problems where the code can actually catch mistakes in the reasoning.

  And it did catch mistakes. That’s the whole point of this approach, you’re using the calculations as a check on the thinking, not just trusting the narrative.

  Working Through Problems Together

  As we worked through each challenge, I kept asking clarifying questions. What about this edge case? How would we handle that constraint?

  It was genuinely collaborative, me bringing curiosity and some engineering intuition, Claude bringing the ability to quickly formalize ideas into code and calculations.

  The code isn’t public or anything. But the approach is what I think is worth sharing.

  The Hard Part Is Still Hard

  My main limiting factor is time. The math looks generally fine to me, but if I really wanted to verify everything thoroughly, I’d need to spend a lot more time with it. A mathematician or physicist who’s deeply familiar with these calculations would be much faster at spotting issues. Providing guidance like, “no, you shouldn’t use this formula here, that approach is wrong.”

  I can do that work. It’s just going to take me significantly longer than someone with that specialized background.

  This is what I mean when I talk about working with agentic tools on hard problems. It’s not about asking an AI for the answer. It’s about using it as a thinking partner; one that can write code, run calculations, and help you check your reasoning as you go.

  For me, that’s the real power of tools like Claude. Not replacing expertise, but amplifying curiosity.

  Mar 23, 2026 / AI / Claude / Space / Engineering

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• The World's Strongest Cable Is One Atom Thick

  I fell down a rabbit hole this morning. It started with a simple question: how far are we really from a space elevator? This really is a feasibility question, and I"m convinced that the answer is probably no, but for a really fascinating reason.

  The Basic Problem

  A space elevator needs a cable stretching from Earth’s surface to geostationary orbit, so about 36,000 kilometers up. That cable has to hold its own weight, plus whatever cargo you’re lifting, plus deal with a counterweight extending beyond geostationary orbit that’s constantly trying to pull away to balance everything out.

  The heavier the cable, the more stress it puts on itself. So you need something impossibly light and impossibly strong. Carbon nanotubes were the go-to candidate for years, but even their theoretical limits fall short of what’s needed. The forces involved are just too extreme.

  Enter Graphene

  Graphene is similar to carbon nanotubes, but instead of a tube, it’s a flat hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms… so essentially a really long sheet, or aka a ribbon.

  The world’s strongest cable isn’t round. It’s flat, and it’s one atom thick.

  That’s kind crazy to think about, that the strongest material we can come up with is literally as thin as matter gets.

  Why It Still Won’t Work (Probably)

  Even if graphene has the right properties on paper, we have a number of impossibly hard engineering problems.

  Manufacturing: We can’t produce a continuous ribbon of graphene anywhere close to the lengths needed. We’re talking thousands of kilometers of perfectly formed, single-atom-thick material. So not happening.

  You don’t want one ribbon anyway: Even if you could manufacture a single ribbon that long, you wouldn’t want to. You need redundancy. If one section gets damaged — and at 36,000 km of exposure to space debris, micrometeorites, and atmospheric forces, damage is a when, not an if. You need backup ribbons to bear the load. So you’d need separate sections, separate lengths.

  The bonding problem: And this is where I think the whole concept falls apart. There’s no reliable way to bond or clamp separate graphene ribbons together. Think about it… how do you reliably verify that something one atom thick is actually bonded properly? Every single joint, every repair, becomes a critical failure point. You can’t just slap a section in place and hope for the best.

  To do that in a reproducible, verifiable way, at scale, in space, repeatedly. I think that’s the thing that makes the space elevator functionally impossible. Not conceptually impossible, but practically impossible.

  The Climber Problems

  I’m deliberately ignoring all the problems the climber introduces (the mechanism that actually lifts cargo up the cable). There’s a whole separate set of headaches there. But the cable itself is the fundamental challenge, and it comes down to this:

  We might have identified the right material. Graphene’s properties are genuinely remarkable. But knowing what to build something out of and knowing how to build it are two very different things.

  Mar 21, 2026 / Science / Space / Engineering

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