Keyword: carbondesigns
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KC: Did you see Michael Griffin's interview in USA Today last week?BE: No, but I know the general gist. It’s not a surprise. In my mind the Space Shuttle and Space Station are not valuable efforts. It’s not what NASA should be doing. NASA is using technology from commercial enterprises, or very old technology from the 70's to try and do space exploration. If they are going to be a real premier space agency, they need to be pushing it. It seems like there was a long-standing debate between rockets and the Space Shuttle. From where you sit, that's like...
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Ribbon to the Stars Pushing the space elevator closer to reality Ron Cowen If the laws of celestial mechanics make it possible for an object to stay fixed in the sky, might it not be possible to lower a cable down to the surface and so establish an elevator system linking earth to space? —Arthur C. Clarke, 1978, The Fountains of Paradise. After a cruise through tropical waters, you arrive at a large, anchored platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The sea is calm, the sky a picture-postcard blue. But you've come in search of an experience even...
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The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 27 March 2002 ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO -- Make way for the ultimate high-rise project: the space elevator. Long viewed as science fiction "imagineering", researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality. Still, the mental picture needed to grasp the elevator to space idea…well, you can't be weak of mind. Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up...
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Is This the Right Way to Return to the Moon? By Glenn Harlan Reynolds Published 09/21/2005 President George W. Bush has called for Americans to return to the moon by 2020. Now NASA has come out with a more detailed presentation, reported in Space.com, of what they have in mind: NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018. The U.S. space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan to key...
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SANTA FE, New Mexico -- No matter how you view it, a space elevator is a stretch not only of vision, but also of far-out materials and cutting-edge technology. Putting in place a space elevator is complicated: Extend a super-strong ribbon from an Earth-situated platform at the equator out beyond geosynchronous orbit. Once in position, electric lifts clamped to the ribbon would truck spacecraft, science gear, as well as passenger-carrying modules into space. But the quest for a revolutionary route to space is getting very real. So real, in truth, that the specter of a terrorist attack on such a...
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ANTA FE, N.M. — With advances toward ultrastrong fibers, the concept of building an elevator 60,000 miles high to carry cargo into space is moving from the realm of science fiction to the fringes of reality. This month, the Los Alamos National Laboratory was a sponsor of a conference to ponder the concept. Yet, the keynote address was by a titan of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, speaking via satellite from his home in Sri Lanka. "I'm happy that people are taking it more and more seriously," said Mr. Clarke, whose novel "The Fountains of Paradise" (1978) revolved around such...
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WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) wants to return to the moon and put a man on Mars. But scientist Bradley C. Edwards has an idea that's really out of this world: an elevator that climbs 62,000 miles into space. Edwards thinks an initial version could be operating in 15 years, a year earlier than Bush's 2020 timetable for a return to the moon. He pegs the cost at $10 billion, a pittance compared with other space endeavors. "It's not new physics — nothing new has to be discovered, nothing new has to be invented from scratch," he...
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WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) wants to return to the moon and put a man on Mars. But scientist Bradley C. Edwards has an idea that's really out of this world: an elevator that climbs 62,000 miles into space.
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Bradley C. Edwards, president and founder of Carbon Designs Inc., is the driving force behind the space elevator, a purportedly safer and cheaper form of transporting explorers and payloads into space. Although the idea has appeared in both technical and fictional literature for decades, the drive to bring it to reality belongs to Edwards. A cable extending from the Earth’s surface to outer space is kept under tension by the competing forces of gravity on Earth and the outward rotational acceleration of the planet in space. Once the cable is aloft, the elevator will be ascended by mechanical means.
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