LONDON, England (CNN Oct: 3rd '08) -- A new space race is officially under way
A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan next month. There hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are are coming together to work on the design of a Carbon Nano-tube lift that
will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.
A Japanese group has more than 100 engineers trying to design a space elevator.
Western Australia and the Galapagos Islands are potential locations for base, out of the way of potential typhoons.
Experts now believe that the concept is well within the bounds of possibility -- maybe even within our lifetimes.
The cable would extend into the sky, eventually reaching a satellite docking station orbiting in space, to be used as a counterweight.
Despite these developments, you could be excused for thinking it all sounds a little far-fetched. Indeed, if successfully built, the space elevator would be an unprecedented feat of human engineering.
If it sounds like the stuff of fiction, maybe that's because it once was, until Arthur C. Clarke brought the idea of a space elevator to a mass audience in 1979, with his novel "The Fountains of Paradise"
NASA is holding a $4 million Space Elevator Challenge to encourage designs for a successful space elevator.
The technology driving the race to build the first space elevator is the quickly developing material or strong carbon nanotube. It is lightweight and has a tensile strength 180
times stronger than that of a steel cable, at the present time. Currently, it is the only material with the potential to be strong enough to use to manufacture elevator cable.
"Building a space elevator is a matter of when, not if,....which will herald a major new period in human history, which will turn humans into a space-bearing species, around 2030" Scientists say.
***Thoughts
Put this in the 'Not Quite Science' category,...until 2030? Hehe
Have they thought what a thick woven Carbon Nano-tube, that conducts electricity, might do to 'ground' the electrical Aurora particle streams, running along the magnetic fields of the Earth?
