To tell the truth, the first time I heard about space elevators it kind of blew my mind. I couldn't get away from the image of launching a tethered object to just the right height and then having it stay there. For some reason it was a lot harder to wrap my mind around that than plain old satellites even though floating should seem more unnatural.
The space elevator has been proposed as a permanent route to space. Instead of launching rockets over and over to get people and things into space, the tether will acts as a road vehicles to climb, carrying people and materials.
The space elevator is way cooler than a base on Mars or more star wars defense projects but as I was looking around for fresh abstracts to link to this post I didn't find anything newer than 2005 in Google scholar. However, I did find a competition planned for fall 2007 to improve the design. The prize is $1 million.
There are several technological hurdles to the creation of the space elevator. Most importantly is the design of the tether which must be miles long and incredibly strong. Most groups are focusing on carbon nanotubes and a ribbon-like tether. Nova has a GREAT video on the subject with nice graphics and some video of the creation of nanotubes.
1 comment:
I fully support the space elevator.
How else are we gonna get supplies to the Death Star that Cheney is planning to build?
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