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Doors Open for Space Elevator Conference

Posted on: Monday, 28 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

WASHINGTON -- Step on the elevator and press the "up" button. Step off eight days later at a platform thousands of miles in outer space.

There will be no blast of rocket fire and smoke. No lift-off "G- forces." Nobody will count backwards from 10. Just get on the "space elevator" and ride.

The term is not a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) designation for a new space program or a new generation of spacecraft.

Scientists are instead talking about constructing the kind of machine that goes from floor to floor in an office building or hotel -- but using it to send cargo and someday people to heights of 22,000 miles and more. They think they can do it within a decade.

The cost could be less than $12 billion, not much more than some bridges on Earth.

The space elevator concept was dramatized in an Arthur C. Clarke science fiction novel, The Fountains of Paradise, 26 years ago.

It suddenly became feasible with the 1991 discovery of carbon nanotubes, a superstrong material, said space engineer Bradley Edwards of the Institute for Scientific Research in Fairmont, W.Va., a private study center that works for both government and private clients.

A nanotube "ribbon" -- 3 feet wide and 62,000 miles long -- would support an elevator that could carry 13 tons of cargo in a single trip, according to new designs.

The ribbon would be held up by the spinning of the Earth, the way the string of a yo-yo remains taut when a child whirls it around her head.

For the past five years, Edwards has been working on designs for a space elevator, funded chiefly by grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts in Atlanta.

"It's practical and it's doable," he said in a telephone interview. "It would cost $6 billion. When you add the cost of dealing with regulations and studies and the international aspects of it, we estimate the cost might be twice that much."

Bradley will co-chair a meeting here today through Wednesday for scientists from the Institute for Advanced Concepts; the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.; Los Alamos National Laboratory near Albuquerque, N.M.; and other organizations to talk about the space elevator.

According to a schedule of this "Third Annual Space Elevator Conference," participants will take up such matters as:

* Whether the "climber" that crawls up and down the nanotube ribbon should be powered by a large laser or by solar energy from space.

* How to deal with the danger that space junk might crash into the elevator and bring it down.

* The possible problem of radiation hazard.

* The economics of the space elevator.

* What is known about the health effects of carbon nanotubes.

Although scientists have speculated about a space elevator for years, the talk never got over the hurdle of what material to use. Anything strong enough would be too heavy.

Some called the hypothetical substance "unobtainium," Edwards said.

Then in 1991, a Japanese scientist studying fullerenes, newly designed carbon molecules that are shaped somewhat like architect Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic dome, discovered an elongated version, which became known as a nanotube.

Although nanotube fibers are 100 times stronger than steel, the substance is almost unimaginably light, Bradley said. The 3-foot- wide "ribbon" that his design envisions would be as thick as a sheet of paper.

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