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Is it time for us to get serious about building a "Space Elevator?" On August 13, approximately 280 people gathered at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond Washington for a "Space Elevator Overview" public lecture, with 60 attendees continuing on to be part of the four day long Fifth International Space Elevator Conference sponsored by Microsoft and JPL Foundation. Delegates flew in from Japan, Armenia and other far-off locations. A proposal for a space elevator was first published by Yuri Artsunov in the USSR in 1960. At that time, the west knew little about Artsunov's work, and the idea was re-invented...

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."

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.

In less than 20 minutes, researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) can now seed, heat and grow carbon nanotubes in 10-foot-long, hollow thin steel tubing. “The work took us three years to develop and get right, but now we can essentially anchor nanotubes to a tubular wall. No one has ever done anything like this before,” said lead researcher Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of NJIT’s Dep’t of Chemistry and Environmental Science. Graduate and post-doctoral students who worked on the project are Mahesh Karwa, Chutarat Saridara and Roman Brukh. The ground-breaking method will lead to improvements...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Space may still be the final frontier, but getting there could soon be almost as simple as stepping into the office lift at the start of the day. The race is on to build the first "space elevator' - long dismissed as science fiction - to carry people and materials into orbit along a cable thousands of miles long. In a significant step, American aviation regulators have just given permission for the opening trials of a prototype, while a competition to be launched next month follows in the wake of the $10 million (£5.6 million) "X Prize'', which led to...

Space may still be the final frontier, but getting there could soon be almost as simple as stepping into the office lift at the start of the day. The ‘space elevator’ Click to enlarge The race is on to build the first "space elevator' - long dismissed as science fiction - to carry people and materials into orbit along a cable thousands of miles long. In a significant step, American aviation regulators have just given permission for the opening trials of a prototype, while a competition to be launched next month follows in the wake of the $10 million (£5.6...

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...

The $400,000 NASA- Centennial Challenge-backed space elevator competition Elevator 2010, organised by the Spaceward Foundation, has gained a sponsor and nine teams are expected to compete for this year’s climber and tether events, writes Rob Coppinger. Supported with the NASA money and its new sponsor, Californian mechanical design company Gizmonics, the Spaceward Foundation’s two competitions will begin three weeks later than expected on 21 October, because it needs more time to organise the infrastructure to test the technologies (Flight International, 5-12 April). The elevator would operate using a payload carrying vehicle, called a climber, that moves slowly up a 36,000km...

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 25, 2005--LiftPort Group, the space elevator companies, today announced plans for a carbon nanotube manufacturing plant, the company's first formal facility for production of the material on a commercial scale. Called LiftPort Nanotech, the new facility will also serve as the regional headquarters for the company, and represents the fruition of the company's three years of research and development efforts into carbon nanotubes, including partnering work with a variety of leading research institutions in the business and academic communities. Set to open in June of this year, LiftPort Nanotech will be located in Millville, New Jersey, a community...

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.

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...

Enthusiasts on Friday unveiled an effort to establish an annual competition for space-elevator technologies, taking a page from the playbook for other high-tech contests such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

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.

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...

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...

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...