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Space Elevator
built 633 days ago
The Space Elevator is a revolutionary Earth-to-Space transportation system proposed in 1960 by Yuri Artsutanov and enhanced in 2000 by Dr. Bradley Edwards, then at Los Alamos National Labs. The system is comprised of a stationary cable rotating in unison with the Earth, with one end anchored to the surface of the planet and the other end in space. Electric cars then travel up and down the cable, carrying cargo and people.
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The Space Elevator concept is a structure extending from the surface of the Earth to geo-stationary Earth orbit (GEO). Its center of mass is at GEO such that the entire structure orbits the Earth in sync with the Earth’s rotation maintaining a stationary position over its base attachment at the equator. It is envisioned that such a structure would be used as a mass transportation system in the latter part of the 21st century for transporting people, payloads, gasses and power between Earth and space.
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The first contest, called the Space Elevator challenge, required teams to build a robotic climber that could scale a tether 100 meters tall in less than a minute. The chief requirement ... was that the climber received energy from a ground source, rather than fuel or batteries. The second challenge, the Strong Tether Challenge, called on teams to build a robust tether of materials that could one day be the conveyer belt into space. MIT, for example, built a tether of carbon nanotubes, a strong new material, but the university team still didn't win.
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The Space Elevator concept has, up until recently, been an idea based solely in science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke popularized this idea in the book Fountains of Paradise. The idea in that book was to use a diamond ribbon more than 100,000km long to connect an earth based station to a counterweight in space. Mr. Clarke doesn’t seem to be far off, as the current predictions do require carbon, but in a different configuration; that of a carbon nanotube.
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[N]o wonder: A working elevator would reduce the cost of launching anything into space by roughly 98 percent. The $500 million it takes to launch the average satellite (insurance not included) would be a thing of the past. Business won't have seen anything like it since the railroad. "All of a sudden," says Brad Edwards, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist who founded Sedco, one of the startups, "space will be open for real activity."
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A space elevator cannot be an elevator in the typical sense (with moving cables) due to the need for the cable to be significantly wider at the center than the tips. While various designs employing moving cables have been proposed, most cable designs call for the "elevator" to climb up a stationary cable.
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