Space Elevator Competition

Space ElevatorWill it have more than one button?

S.F. Chronicle reports: “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 of a motorized robotic “climber” powered only by light beams and capable of carrying humans and cargo more than 62,000 miles into space on a tough, lightweight “tether” thinner than Saran wrap. The tether would be made of substances called carbon nanotubes that haven’t yet been created in quantity.

Glenn Reynolds has much more on space elevators.

One Response to “Space Elevator Competition”

  1. Brian Dunbar Says:

    The Chronicle is wrong.

    Space is not a long long way up. Space is only 50 miles away.

    Space is, however, a extremely difficult to get to; the transaction costs of shipping ’stuff’ there affect everything related to space. What the space elevator could do is to drop these transaction costs to the floor.

    Estimates vary but a good figure to use is that it costs $10,000 per pound to orbit. We think we can bring that down to $400 per pound with the first system. Things get loose and interesting - and very hard to predict - after that.

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