'Shoot The Moon' Documentary Trailer: Building An Elevator To Space

For all the movies we watch about attractive heroes zipping around between planets, the number of actual people who've been to outer space is quite small. But that could change if Michael Laine has anything to do with it.

For the past several years, Laine and his team at LiftPort have been working to try and make a space elevator a reality. The new documentary Shoot the Moon chronicles their efforts, specifically their ambitious attempt to send an unmanned robot up the tallest free-standing human structure in in existence. Watch the Shoot the Moon trailer after the jump.

And now, here's the Shoot the Moon trailer from the Kickstarter campaign page. LiftPort was itself funded in part by Kickstarter, so Shoot the Moon is a Kickstarter project about a different Kickstarter project.

A space elevator will sound like something out of sci-fi to most people, but Laine seems to have a lot of the practical details worked out. Still, he knows his dream won't become reality unless others also want to see it become reality.

"Public awareness is as important as the actual engineering," Laine said. "We could have all the parts for a space elevator sitting in a warehouse, ready to go, but we can't build it without public support."

If you'd like to pitch in with the movie, and therefore LiftPort's public awareness campaign, go visit its Kickstarter page. Shoot the Moon is being directed by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Benjamin Ahr Harrison.

12 men have set foot on the moon, and getting them there cost $25.4 billion dollars. The last moonwalk ended more than 40 years ago. Two men, Michael and David, are dedicating their lives to creating the next great leap for humanity, and they think they can give us permanent access to the moon for less than a billion dollars.

We're filming their journey to build an elevator to space.

Their quest has reached a critical juncture. They're taking on their biggest experiment yet: making a robot climb the tallest free-standing human structure in existence, and we're capturing it all on film. The lead up. The experiment. Everything.