Space Elevator Company LiftPort In Trouble

TropicalCoder writes "The LiftPort Group, founded four years ago with the lofty dream of building a stairway to heaven, has seemingly reached the end the line. The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit. Elevator cars would be robotic 'lifters' which would climb the ribbon to deliver cargo and eventually people to orbit or beyond. Now LiftPort has all but run out of funds, and the State of Washington's Securities Division has entered a Statement of Charges (PDF) against LiftPort Inc. dba LiftPort Group and founder Michael Laine."

my dream is ruined

just when i was dreaming of saying Beam (lift) Me up Scottie!

Re:my dream is ruined

It's OK. When you get there, the stores are all closed.

Wow!!

The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit

And it didn't work?!?!?! No S... Sherlock!

Tell me about feasible goals.

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Four years isn't enough time to go from wild fantasy sci-fi idea to feasible goal. Especially if you screw up the stock offering (I didn't RTFA) and lose funding.

Re:Wow!!

The goals were very feasible, unfortunately the CEO took delivery of his new flying car shortly after announcing these targets. The car came with a 3D windscreen tied into the incar entertainment and a copy of duke nukem forever, which apparently is a hugely addictive game. This led to the CEO becoming somewhat distracted by gaming while flying and the company lost focus which ultimately meant goals were missed.

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I heard the in-car entertainment system was the Phantom.

Re:Wow!!

If you're going to say "shit" say "shit." Don't say "S...". Using dots instead of letters doesn't conceal what you intend to say so isn't any politer. All it does is make it look as though someone has the right to stop you using the word.

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How about you jam your suggestions in your a.. you m.....f...... Don't you have something better to do then criticize someones self censorship?

Re:

Perhaps the poster wasn't intending to come off as polite, but instead, less so?

I for one always felt that "self-censorship" of s*** like that helps make the comment a f***load more profane, than if it were spelled out completely. :)

For example, it even wo

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They weren't going to just build a space elevator, much of the technology that they were developing was also going to be licensed off. They weren't just about the end-game. Like many companies with long term goals, they fund their R&D by licensing th

What Liftport is being charged with:

What Liftport is being charged with, from the pdf:

1. The offer and/or sale of the investments described above constitute the offer and/or sale of a security as defined in RCW 21.20.005 (10) and (12).
2. Michael Laine violated RCW 21.20.040, by offering and selling said securities while not registered as a securities salesperson or broker-dealer in the State of Washington.
3. Liftport, Inc. violated 21.20.140 by offering and selling unregistered securities.
4. In connection with the offer or sale of the said securities Liftport, Inc., violated RCW 21.20.010 because, as set forth in the Tentative Findings of Fact, Respondent made misstatements of material fact or omitted to state material facts necessary in order to make the statements made, in light of circumstances under which they were made, not misleading and/or engaged in acts and practices that operated as a fraud or deceit.

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also this from page 3:

9. Liftport failed to provide material information regarding the company including, but not limited to: financial statements; use of proceeds; projected costs to develop and build the space elevator; general risk factors related to the space technology; and specific risk factors related to space elevator production.

I think even a 5th grader would consider the first space elevator a risky investment.

Hah.

Lesson: You don't offer "common stock" to people without following detailed securities regulations and laws. In fact, you don't mention that at all until you've consulted with people that know of these things. The president of Liftport obviously never took an Economics class where you would have learned at least that the whole stock system is very complicated and very regulated.

Good call, Washington (state). Sucks for the idea, though.

Uh...

I don't think you need to take an economics course to learn this. Anybody who forms a corporation should have an attorney and a CPA. Oneof those two people, if not both, should have said, "If you want to raise money that way, you need to follow certain rules, or you need to factor jail time for the corporate officers into the business plan."

Re:Hah.

he... a prospectus that I used for one of my companies was 37 pages long. The first 10 or so pages were the legal boiler plate (ie... "YOU HAVE A 99.999% CHANCE OF LOSING YOUR MONEY"), followed by a few more pages of definitions. The next 10 or so pages were full of core business info (company overview, product(s) overview, executive bios). 5 or so pages were full of financial and the remaining pages were essentially a rehash of the "YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MONEY". It was embarrassing to be in the presence of a potential investor while they read through it.

Investor: "What does it mean, 'The Company's methods and operations are unproven'?"
Me: "That means we are a startup and have not been in business very long."
Investor: "Ok. What about: 'The Company's products and services may never make it to market'?"
Me: "Well, we can't guarantee that our services and products will ever sell"
Investor: 'Hm. What about: 'The Company cannot guarantee that its products and services will be able to compete with its established competitors'?"
Me: (Twitching uncontrollably and muttering something about first to market)
Investor: "So, it sounds to me that what you are looking for is someone to put money into an unproven company, that may never actually bring a product to market, and that if you do somehow manage to bring it to market, no one may care. Does that sum it up?"
Me: "Er..."
Investor: "Do I have the word 'DUMBFUCK' tattooed on my forehead?"
Me: "Err... no (under breath: fucking lawyers!)".

I understand the whole concept of not allowing companies to make absurd claims that ignorant sheep will buy into to, but having to essentially emasculate your company is, well... emasculating.

Blue Sky Laws

Well I would be interested to know how the State of Washinton came to these conclusions and charges. Blue Sky laws are put into place to protect un-savy investors from being taken by kinky investment opportunities, but the charges don't seem to translate into a direct blue sky violation, and at worst, seems to stem from his lack of registering with the State that he would be selling securities.

They mention that he sold to un-accredited investors, but this is allowable under Regulation D, assuming he didn't take more then $1M and that the people he took money from were previous business associates, friends, or family.

I think this boils down to an angry Washington resident that put money into this 'venture' and lost it, and now is angry.

Re:Blue Sky Laws

you are wrong in your application of blue sky laws (other posters are right, sorry)

however you nailed it with this part:
"seems to stem from his lack of registering with the State that he would be selling securities."

that is exactly what happened. i gave the documents to the individuals, but not to the state. i thought i was covered under Reg D, as i was only asking for $500k and that i could work with unaccredited investors. so far as i know, and i think the state agrees, that part is true. what i didnt know, was that i had to file with the states, too. under Reg. D, you dont need to file with the feds. since it was a federal exemption, i thought i also excepted me from the individual states as well. i found out - much to my embarrassment, anger and frustration, that i was wrong. it came down to not filing in the state... for which i have to pay a penalty.

but lets keep it in perspective here - its 'only' a $2ok fine. if i had done something really 'bad', that would have been much much much stiffer.

and no, so far as i know, i dont have any angry investors - anywhere. it is a paperwork snafu, and nothing more.

thanks for actually taking the time to read and understand the documents. most people on slashdot are not bothering to do that.

take care. mjl
michael laine
liftport group.

Re:Blue Sky Laws

However, if you learn how to speak properly I wouldn't have to read it twice to understand it.

I hear what you are thinking, but I'm not sure I see what you are saying.

What if it falls?

A major plot point of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars [amazon.com] is a space elevator's outer anchor being destroyed, sending the tether falling down on the red planet and causing all kinds of damage as it winds around. Obviously such a scenario would be taken into

Re:What if it falls?

This issue is addressed in the Wikipedia entry for Space Elevator [wikipedia.org], with a reference to a simulation [mit.edu].

It makes a good disaster story, but analysis shows that only significant danger is to anyone that happened to be on the elevator at the time.

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Plausible real-world space elevators aren't huge cables. They're thin ribbons. If one was cut near the top, it wouldn't fall back to Earth so much as... flutter.

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Who cares? They'll figure that out later. That's just one of those minor details like "the materials to build this thing don't exist yet" and "we don't have anything that could contruct it even if we had the material".

But I bet they've got some lovely arti

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Yeah, that definitely wouldn't happen. The cable itself isn't that dense, so it has a very low terminal velocity, and most of the cable would burn up on re-entry. In any case a safety procedure in such a situation might be to simply release the cable from

How would this NOT have been a fraud...

Long LONG before you can build a space elevator you need tether materials which are several orders of magnitude stronger than what we can build today...

If you could even get 1/100th of the way there on materials, you would have a great company selling fibers for military and industrial applications.

Re:How would this NOT have been a fraud...

Long LONG before you can build a space elevator you need tether materials which are several orders of magnitude stronger than what we can build today...

If you could even get 1/100th of the way there on materials, you would have a great company selling fibers for military and industrial applications.

Precisely what I was thinking. It's like the people talking about putting up space hotels before we even have the cheap civilian access to space question answered.

Step 1: Found a startup whose business model is predicated on a technology that not only does not exist but you are incapable of inventing.
Step 2: Collect money from investors
Step 3: Hope this nonexistent technology falls out of the sky and directly into your lap.
Step 4: Profit!

Hey, I've got this great idea for making your very own Iron Man suit! That's right, you can fly into space, deadlift 100 tons, are bullet proof, missile proof, and nuclear bomb proof! Yes, folks, that's right! And it's all possible via the miracle of unobtanium. That's right, just get me some unobtanium and you can have your very own suit!

While we're at it, I'm selling land on the inside of my dyson sphere. Get in early before it's all gone!

Not gonna happen

I was pretty much convinced the space elevator was never going to happen with our current understanding of material technology anyway. There was a study in Nature a while back by Nicola Pugno who pointed out that defects in carbon nanoribbon would pretty much make it impossible. You need 62 gigapascals of tension strength for a space elevator. Carbon nanoribbon gives you 100 gigapascals. First, note how slim that margin is, and that's with PERFECT nanoribbon. But perfection is difficult to achieve in the real world, and inevitable atomic defects reduce the strength of the ribbon dramatically. Just a single atom defect in a single strand reduces strength by 30%. Bulk material consisting of many strands reduces that even further.

I can't find the original article, but here's [technovelgy.com] a typical write-up at the time.

Who knows, maybe somebody will invent something better than carbon nanotubes, but even a perfect ribbon has a mighty slim margin.

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Redundant strands don't help you with this. If even one of them fails, the damage it'd cause around the globe would be immense.

So yes, you need a material approximately 3 times the strength of a (perfect) carbon nanotube in order to be a relatively safe c

Re:

Or, to put it another way, the Space Elevator is a glorious technology that may one day be built by an advanced human civilization, and when it is, it will be a modern world wonder.. but that day is not today.. it's probably not even in the next 30 years.

It seems to me...

It seems that a good place to try something like this would be the moon. It's relatively close, it has no wind to complicate things, it's gravity is dramatically less, so we could probably build it with today's materials science, and it would make getting on and off the moon dramatically easier.

After all, if your goal is to swim the English Channel, you might want to try swimming across a pool first.

Re:It seems to me...

After all, if your goal is to swim the English Channel, you might want to try swimming across a pool first.

Well, the analogy is more like if your goal is to swim the English Channel, then why not try swimming across a pool at the top of Mount Everest? :)

In other words, the actual designing of the moon elevator is much less of a problem than getting all the material to the moon, doing construction on the moon (dust!), and all the organizational infrastructure needed to do a project of that scope so far from the Earth.

MARS

I was thinking of mars myself--- after the moon, we should build one on mars-- although one on mars would be more handy sooner rather than later.

Re:Not gonna happen

Where did you pull that 100GPa number from? From what I have read, the theoretical strength is closer to 300GPa.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/287 /5453/637 [sciencemag.org]

Yes, it will be difficult to produce cables of sufficient quality, but I find it surprising how many people are willing to make such unfounded claims of impossibility. It may not happen in the near future, but if the theoretical strength is even remotely close to reality, the space elevator is basically a certainty.

Re:Not gonna happen

When you say "notice how slim the margin is" when comparing 62 gigapascals needed with the 100 gigapascals achievable, that seems to be a lot to me. 48 gigpascals is equivalent to 1,000,000 metric tons falling a metre, isn't it? Sounds like quite a lot.

It's not the amount that's important, it's the percentage. Put it this way... you're pulling a 620lb trailer with your car, which, say, has your kids in it. Would you be comfortable with using a 1,000 pound test rope to haul the trailer? After all, that's an extra 380lbs! Or do you think a few hard jerks could potentially snap the rope pretty easily?

Now, "hard jerks" wouldn't necessarily be a problem with a space elevator (but maybe winds COULD cause temporary increases in tension, I don't know), but you can see that safety margin isn't a bad thing.

Re:

Well in that case, I'm not really convinced. I don't think it is the percentage that matters. It's how your margin of error compares to the variability of other factors that affect it. An example would be threading a needle. Say the thread is 80% the widt

Puts me in the mind for a song...

Michael Laine [sold] securities while not registered as a securities salesperson[...]offering and selling unregistered securities[...]misstatements of material fact or omitted to state material facts necessary[...]engaged in acts and practices that operated as a fraud or deceit.

Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a Genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car, Spacelifting Monorail! [wikipedia.org]

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What's it called?

Another great idea...

...that crashed back to Earth.

Gordon Bell: "more than two breakthroughs"

In his book, High-Tech Ventures, Digital Equipment Corporation pioneer Gordon Bell analyzed various factors in the potential success of startups.

As I recall, one of his great big red flags was any product whose development entailed more than two technology breakthrough.

Yeah, here it is [microsoft.com] (PDF). He says, flatly, "A successful startup cannot be based on more than two breakthroughs in the state of the art. And for each area requiring a breakthrough, an alternative technology should be available as a backup."

So, by this measure, the Wright Brothers needed breakthroughs in engines and airframe design... so success was possible.

As for LiftPort, I think I've lost count of the number of breakthroughs they need.

And I'm not sure what their backup technology would have been if, by any chance, the carbon nanotube strategy turned out to be unfeasible.

Only one breakthrough needed

To build a space elevator only one breakthrough is needed: a high tensile strength cable. Other improvements in current technology are needed, but compared to getting the cable, everything else seems simple.

In Arthur Clarke's "Fountains of Paradise" the cable was made of monocrystalline diamond. I don't know how the tensile strength of compares to that of other carbon structures, but this paper (PDF) [cam.ac.uk] mentions values of over 1200 GPa at certain orientations, much better than what's needed for a space elevator. So, the real breakthrough needed is how to manufacture enough monocrystalline diamond fiber at a reasonable price.

Re:

Hundreds of breakthroughs? You're clearly speaking ignorance out of your ass, not having bothered to catch up with the work already put into this.

Just because nobody built a submergeable car doesn't mean that building one requires a breakthrough. The techn

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Tether deployment because so far attempts to uncoil long cables in outer space have only been marginally successful. Just because it's easy to describe doesn't mean it's easy to do. Not saying it's impossible, but it needs significant R&D -- ie a bre

I'm not surprised

Their business model was akin to counting on the rental income from office space in the Empire State building...in the year 1400 BC .

"Hey, we've just invented this new material, let's build this fantastically tall thing that is far beyond our present te

Budget.

They have a website that looks as if it's been knocked together by a 13-year-old kid who wants to be a rocket scientist. If what's on display there is anything to go by the company seems to be going nowhere. "Primarily targeting the hardware of the space elevator, the LiftPort Group member companies are researching and designing the nuts and bolts in the fields of carbon nanotube production, robotics, photo voltaics, power beaming and targeting, and permanent floating structures for the ocean. Outside of that, we also are responsible for project management, web design, public relation, accounting, and legal issues for each member company of the group." So we need to do all this... we're not really sure how to do it... but give us some money and we'll work it out. If it wasn't in the news I'd have assumed it was a scam. Somebody really didn't do their homework before they made an investment.

Zed Zeppelin

No stairway. Denied!

Impossible?

Carbon nanotubes were not a problem, but the investors just could not understand how humans could endure several hours of elevator music.

But /. was so excited!

I remember how excited all the nerds on /. were around 1998 about this, and then every subsequent year thereafter when another "breakthrough" on the path to the ultimate breakthrough was announce. If I recall correctly, the space elevator was supposed to be functional in 10 years from 1998.

I do wonder where all the money went. Will this be on one of those specials on Discovery Channel?

comments from michael laine

I don't know if anybody noticed, but we seem to have some feedback from Michael Laine of LiftPort himself. Since he logged on as Anonymous Coward, his remarks are coming out at 0, below the radar of most readers. It seems no moderator has considered elevating his comments, or is not convinced that the writer is indeed Michael Laine of LiftPort.

Mr. Laine - if that is really you, I would suggest that you log on, so that your comments will at least start out at 1 and thereby become visible. If you wish, drop me a note, and I will interview you (via email or Skype) on behalf of Slashdot. (Click the contact-me link on my web page). Of course you can expect to be properly authenticated in the process.

Interview with Michael Laine

I just got off the phone with Michael J. Laine, President of the LiftPort Group. In a previous comment, I had noted that there was some direct feedback from Mr. Laine, but his comments came out at 0 because he logged on as AC. Since I felt no one had noticed his comments, I offered to interview him on behalf of Slashdot, and he contacted me and accepted my offer. I was able to authenticate that indeed I was in touch with the real Michael J. Laine. I must say it was very interesting conversation. In the end it was agreed that I will prepare a list of questions for Michael, mostly based on Slashdot comments posted here, giving him a chance to respond to each in his own words. If you wish to add to the that list, pose your question here and now. I hope to be able to submit the completed interview within 24 hours, and then it will be up to Slashdot editors if and when to post it.

TropicalCoder

Legos anyone?

This "company" has got a lot of coverage over the last few years on Slashdot. This is not because of anything that they have done, but because of the type of company they are. The opportunity to go to space and participate in the creation of extra-terrestrial colonies and worlds is the dream of every nerd wishing to escape the mundane realities facing them.

Anyway, the first time I saw the website for Liftport, they had pictures of LEGO MODELS laying on carpet taken with a cheap digital camera, and poorly drawn visualizations that looked like pictures out of books about the future that I read when I was in the 3rd grade. These guys have built a toy that can climb ropes, and that's about it.

When I was 10 years old, I started a spy company and opened up shop in my bedroom. This was fantasy mind you, but I don't see how it's any different from Liftport. Follow your dreams, yes, but don't be a fool either. Seriously, these guys have done nothing more advanced than your average high school science project, but because they surround themselves with the vernier of a registered corporation that somehow legitimizes them?

LS

Re:

RTFA that's not why they're suing