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A Finnish company says that it has solved a problem that has vexed the designers of ultra-tall skyscrapers such as the 828-meter Burj Khalifa in Dubai or the 509-meter Taipei 101 in Taiwan – and we'll pause for a moment to let you guess what that problem might be. Ready? It's the fact that elevators are currently limited to a maximum travel distance of around 500 meters. The Burj Khalifa, in fact, has an elevator that holds the world record for the longest travel distance: 504m (1,654 feet). And what's keeping elevators from exceeding that limit? Time for another pause...

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...

Proposal: Removing Earth's Radiation Belts By Leonard David posted: 07:00 am ET 16 September 2002 Here's a cinch of an idea: How about a little Van Allen Belt tightening? By using highly charged orbiting space tethers, the Earth's cocoon of menacing and deadly radiation belts might be easily and largely aced out. For one, satellites in the future could live longer not having to fend off the frenzy of energetic particles. Moreover, human-carrying spacecraft would be far safer zooming about in Earth orbit or speeding outward to distant destinations. The novel concept is called the High Voltage Orbiting Long...

Tether Technology: A New Spin on Space Propulsion By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 18 June 2003 In the near future, revolutionary space hardware could put an exciting spin on spaceflight. NASA is putting money into Momentum-eXchange/Electrodynamic Reboost tether technology -- MXER for short -- an innovative concept that if implemented would station miles and miles of cart-wheeling cable in orbit around the Earth. Then, rotating like a giant sling, the cable would swoop down and pick up spacecraft in low orbits, then hurl them to higher orbits or even lob them onward to other...

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...

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.

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.

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...

The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 27 March 2002 ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO -- Make way for the ultimate high-rise project: the space elevator. Long viewed as science fiction "imagineering", researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality. Still, the mental picture needed to grasp the elevator to space idea…well, you can't be weak of mind. Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up...

Ribbon to the Stars Pushing the space elevator closer to reality Ron Cowen If the laws of celestial mechanics make it possible for an object to stay fixed in the sky, might it not be possible to lower a cable down to the surface and so establish an elevator system linking earth to space? —Arthur C. Clarke, 1978, The Fountains of Paradise. After a cruise through tropical waters, you arrive at a large, anchored platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The sea is calm, the sky a picture-postcard blue. But you've come in search of an experience even...

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...

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 to followers of NASA's Centennial Challenges programme. The desired outcome is a 62,000-mile (99,779 km) tether that robotic lifters – powered by laser beams...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...