Diamonds for astronauts sounds like a really expensive -- albeit deserving -- gift for these space age scientists. According to a new study, diamonds have the best applications in making a space elevator and other items.

A study, released last week, revealed that the chemical bonds and materials within diamonds can have different functions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronauts, including a space elevator. While the use of diamonds sound ambitious as well as costly, there are positive and negatives for using this expensive material.

the study proposed that diamonds could be synthetically strong enough to support something like a space elevator. The supposed space elevator could be tall and long enough to travel into space, Nature World News reported. While the making of a high tech lift is not exactly an original idea, this super high-tech elevator could reduce costs to fuel and travel time.

There is an alternative to diamonds. A long time ago, diamonds were considered the world's hardest material on the planet, but they were also considered to be very brittle for such a project like the space elevator. Crystals with similar chemical bonds and properties to the diamond, boron-nitrate crystals, have been foundNature World News reported. These types of crystals are likely the toughest and strongest natural materials. Boron-nitrate crystals however are extremely rare.

Here is how using these types of aforementioned crystals would work. According to the study published in the journal of Nature Materials, the crystals have to press and mold benzene -- a flat ring containing six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms. This is what uniquely shapes the nano threads that create and foster a tetrahedral configuration of a diamond, Nature World News reported.

One of the co-authors of the research study, Malcolm Guthrie of the Carnegie Institution for Science, stated that they used a large high pressure device known as the Paris-Edinburgh device, Forbes reported. The device, compared to other experiments, was able crush more of a considerable amount of the benzene.

"One of our wildest dreams for the nanomaterials we are developing is that they could be used to make the super-strong, lightweight cables that would make possible the construction of a 'space elevator,' which so far has existed only as a science-fiction idea," John V. Badding said in a statement. Badding is the lead researcher and a professor of chemistry at Penn State, Nature World News reported.

Badding and his team built the nano threads by connecting and stringing the carbon atoms into a long thin strand of that like a diamond. Badding explains that the researchers are like jewelry makers designing something with the smallest of diamonds or materials, Forbes reported. They expect the thread to be "extraordinarily stiff, extraordinarily strong, and extraordinarily useful."

Most scientists have been trying for decades to succeed by compressing separate molecules. Badding's team has succeeded by slowing down the process.

While they have sort-of succeeded with the nano thread, the caveat is that their process cannot be replicated.

"The high pressures that we used to make the first diamond nano thread material limit our production capacity to only a couple of cubic millimeters at a time," Badding explained, Forbes reported.

Badding and his team have not given up on the use of the nano thread for the space elevator, but they are looking at further applications.