Let's say you're going to buy a 1-meter length of wire fromme. How much would you pay for it? 50 cents? A dollar? $10? Well, recently NASAgave a contract to a university to buy a 1-meter length of wire and they'regoing to pay $11 million. Seems like a whole lot of money, doesn't it? Well,maybe it makes more sense if I tell you that the wire is not going to be madeof copper or steel or even silver, gold or platinum. Instead, it's going to bemade of a new material called carbon nanotubes, which were only reallydiscovered in 1991.
Carbon nanotubes are cylinders made of individual atoms ofcarbon that are formed when a laser smacks into a block of carbon and carbonnanotubes have some really interesting properties and they're really going tobe important in two areas: power generation and space.
Let's talk about power. See this line here. Let's say it'snot a 1-meter length of wire anymore. Let's say it's an electric power grid andover here is your city and over here is your power plant. As you may know, it'snot uncommon for 25% or more of the electricity generated by our electric powerplants to be lost as it gets transmitted over the grid of mainly copper wiring.Carbon nanotubes in theory can be 10 times better conductors of electricitythan copper and they only weigh one-sixth as much. If you have ever been out,you know, on the country side and you've seen the massive wiring stations thegeneration plants need, you can see that a material like carbon nanotubes hasthe possibility to really help with our power needs.
Now what is NASA interested in carbon nanotubes for? Well,this seems a little outfield, but bear with me because it's theoreticallypossible according to physics. Here's the earth. Let's say you want to getsomething into orbit right now. We use rockets. We use the shuttle, veryexpensive, dangerous. It's theoretically possible to build what people call aspace elevator. You can take a point in space that's around 62,000 miles abovethe earth and put something there. It stays in geosynchronous orbit. That meansit doesn't move. Now if you could find a way to build a cable that could runfrom the earth up to here, this point never moves, you can build a spaceelevator and you could easily, much less expensively move people and productsand machines up and down into space. The problem is if you build this wire outof steel or copper or any kind of traditional metal, it's going to be way tooheavy and would collapse. Theoretically, NASA is looking at the possibility ofusing carbon nanotubes to someday build the 62,000 miles space elevator. Socarbon nanotubes, maybe it's worth $11 million.
