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Space is a long, long way up, but a dozen ambitious high-tech teams assembled in Mountain View on Friday, prepared to compete under NASA encouragement with far-out concepts for reaching the planets in ways no one has ever attempted. The dozen teams are inventive entrants into the arcane world of untried ventures in aerospace engineering, and this weekend at NASA's Ames Research Center they will be vying for modest prizes -- the first in an annual series of competitions as creative and extreme as any space groupie could envision. NASA's ultimate goal -- perhaps by 2020 -- is the development...

In January, LiftPort team members deployed a mile-long tether with the help of three large balloons in the Arizona desert (N Aung/LiftPort Group)Related Articles A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line. LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday. The company's lofty objective will sound familiar...

For the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans should propose an idea so big that it stretches to the stars. Republicans should commit the government to building a space elevator by 2020. A space elevator would essentially be a 62,000-mile cable stretching from the earth's surface out into space. Because one end of the cable would be in high orbit, gravity would prevent it from falling back to earth. Once the cable was in place, space travelers would board an elevator-like device and ride up the cable. The 62,000-mile cable would endure tremendous stress from supporting its own mass, so the primary...

It was a showcase of high-tech space technology, but this weekend's X-Prize Cup was cursed by mis-directed post, mis-measured competition equipment and entrants that nearly blew away in the wind. In the end, there were no winners in the competitions for lunar landers and space elevators (see 'Race to space in New Mexico'). Indeed, most entrants got nowhere near the winning post.

lurking_giant writes "In a report on NewScientist.com, researchers working on development of a space elevator (an idea we have discussed numerous times) have determined that the concept is not stable. Coriolis force on the moving climbers would cause side loading that would make stability extremely difficult, while solar wind would cause shifting loads on the geostationary midpoint. All of this would likely make it necessary to add thrusters, which would consume fuel and negate the benefits of the concept. Alternatively, careful choreography of multiple loads might ease the instability, again with unknown but negative economic impacts."

Pull me up, Scotty. At least one team has qualified for part of a $2 million prize up for grabs in this year's Space Elevator Games, a NASA-sponsored contest to build machines that can climb a cable in the sky – precursors for a futuristic transit system to space. On Wednesday, an entry by the Washington state-based team LaserMotive climbed a 3,000-foot (900-meter) tether suspended by a helicopter at a speed of about 8 mph (13 kph). The feat was the best performance yet of a miniature space elevator prototype, though still a long shot away from what would be...

Can Quiet, Efficient 'Space Elevators' Really Work? By Leonard David, Space.com's Space Insider Columnist   |   February 19, 2014 06:38am ET An electric-powered climber spacecraft rides up the space elevator.Credit: Frank Chase/Chase Design StudiosView full size image Is it time to push the "up" button on the space elevator?A space elevator consisting of an Earth-anchored tether that extends 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) into space could eventually provide routine, safe, inexpensive and quiet access to orbit, some researchers say.A new assessment of the concept has been pulled together titled "Space Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility and the Way Forward."...

Going up? Space elevator wins support U.S. company builds on Russian idea Dan Rowe National Post Tuesday, August 13, 2002 The fantastic notion of a space elevator -- a concept that first appeared in a Russian technical journal in the early 1960s and then crept into the works of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s -- could be a reality before long.Seattle-based HighLift Systems is hosting a conference this week to meet with investors and other parties potentially interested in a device that could open the final frontier to the masses within 15 years because of the...

Going Up? Private Group Begins Work on Space Elevator By Leonard DavidSenior Space Writerposted: 07:00 am ET19 August 2002 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON -- The world's space programs are vertically challenged. What's needed is a revolutionary low-cost way to move payloads and people into Earth orbit and then outward to the asteroids, Mars and beyond.Now an upstart company of enterprising engineers and investment strategists want to tackle the ultimate high-rise project for the 21st century: the space elevator. They are on the ground floor of putting calculations to paper and wrestling with the toughest challenges. The message from the First International Space...

Space Elevators Maybe Closer To Reality Than Imagined by Richard Perry Los Angeles - Jul 22, 2003 Space elevators have an image problem, mainly due to two prominent science fiction novels. They appear either ungainly impossible, or so potentially dangerous to the planet itself you would never dream of building one. With the science now indicating that they are potentially near-term transport systems, it's time to review the fiction in relation to the possible reality. Three publications by Pearson in 1975/6/7 and work done by Moravec and published in the Journal of the Astronautical Sciences in 1977 were enough to...

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...

Nanotube Cable Can Connect The Earth And The Moon Moscow - Nov 18, 2003 Researchers from the Institute of Problems of Microelectronics Technology and Extra Pure Materials (Russian Academy of Sciences) have designed and tested a new device for production of a new promising material -- nanotubes. The researchers believe that it is exactly the material a transport cable can be produced of to connect the Moon and the Earth. Back at the beginning of the last century, the idea was born to build a transport cable between the Earth and the Moon to deliver goods from our planet...

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.

Space Elevator Climbs at MIT It was one small climb for the space elevator last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. From high atop the roof of MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building, a tether was lowered to the ground as curious onlookers watched the display in suspended belief under snowy conditions. A scale model of a robot lifter successfully made its way up the lengthy ribbon, under the watchful eye of Michael Laine, president and founder of LiftPort Incorporated. Based in Bremerton, Washington, LiftPort is a for-profit company devoted to the commercial development of an...

The Spaceward Foundation announces details for 2006 Space Elevator Challenge PRESS RELEASEDate Released: Wednesday, November 16, 2005Source: Spaceward Foundation Prize money to triple for 2006 Space Elevator competition. Following the success of the recent 2005 Space Elevator competition held at NASA's Ames Research Center, the Spaceward Foundation announced today the details for the 2006 event, to be held on August 4th in Mountain View California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. "The 2005 challenge was a great event for us" said Ben Shelef, founder of the Spaceward Foundation who is organizing the competitions, "and with 30 teams on the...

Is it possible to make a cable for a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes? Not anytime soon, if ever, says Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy. Pugno's calculations show that inevitable defects in the nanotubes mean that such a cable simply wouldn't be strong enough. The idea of a space elevator was popularized in science fiction, where writers envisioned a 100,000-kilometre-long cable stretching straight up from the Earth's surface and fixed in a geosynchronous orbit. Payloads, or tourists, would simply ascend the cable into low-Earth orbit, eliminating the need for rocket launches.

Tensions rise at space elevator challenge 21:40 22 October 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kelly Young, Las Cruces An emotionally charged, late-night competition to test the strength of tethers designed for use in space elevators ended with no one walking home with the $200,000 first prize on Saturday. Designs for future space elevators call for robotic platforms to carry payloads into space on 100,000-kilometre-long tethers. Proponents of the idea say the method would be cheaper than launching rockets, but the requisite technology still needs to be developed. So in 2005, NASA began sponsoring the Tether Challenge to spur breakthroughs in building...

As pointed out in my recently published paper "Kinetically Strengthened Transportation Structures" in the proceedings of ASCE's Space 2000 and Robotics 2000 conference in Albuquerque NM, we need to start the development of what could be called "Sliding Armature Energy Transfer Technology", using it to centrifugally strengthen and stiffen a masive transportation structure (KESTS) physically connecting the earth's equator with earth's synchronous orbit, then using that transportation system to raise huge solar-electric power satellites up to there, to power that transportation sytem thereafter and to provide electric power to the world's electric power utility grids, thus enabling the preservation of...

REDMOND, Wash. & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), an independent coalition designed to promote outreach and foster research relating to the construction of an Elevator to Space, announced today that Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov and American engineer Jerome Pearson, pioneers of the modern Space Elevator concept, will appear at the 2010 Space Elevator Conference.