Pretty amazing stuff...
SPACE ELEVATOR IS
GETTING CLOSER TO BEING A REALITY
Abridged from
a CNN Story
 A new space
race is officially under way, and this one should have the
sci-fi geeks salivating.
RIGHT: A
NASA artist's view of the space elevator
The project
is a "space elevator," and some experts now believe that the
concept is well within the bounds of possibility -- maybe
even within our lifetimes.
A conference discussing
developments in space elevator concepts is being held in
Japan in November, and hundreds of engineers and scientists
from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the
only lift that will take you directly to the one
hundred-thousandth floor.
Despite these developments,
you could be excused for thinking it all sounds a little
far-fetched.
A cable anchored to the Earth's surface,
reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space,
balanced with a counterweight attached at the other end is
the basic design for the elevator.
It is thought that
inertia -- the physics theory stating that matter retains
its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not
acted upon by an external force -- will cause the cable to
stay stretched taut, allowing the elevator to sit in
geostationary orbit.
If it sounds like the stuff of
fiction, maybe that's because it once was.
In 1979,
Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Fountains of Paradise" brought
the idea of a space elevator to a mass audience. Charles
Sheffield's "The Web Between the Worlds" also featured the
building of a space elevator.
NASA is holding a $4
million Space Elevator Challenge to encourage designs for a
successful space elevator.
It seems that the major
logistical issues keeping the space elevator from being
anything more than a dream is the most likely method of
powering the elevator: through the carbon nanotube cable.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology aeronautics and
astronautics Professor Jeff Hoffman said that designing the
carbon nanotube appeared to be the biggest obstacle. "I
don't know if it's going to be in our lifetime or if it's
100 or 200 years away, but it's near enough that we can
contemplate how it will work."
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