The first question everyone asks me when I show them this page is..."Is this something that is actually possible?"
Heck yes! Read on.
I've been interested in the space elevator concept since reading the novel THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE by Arthur C. Clark, in 1978. He once quipped that the space elevator would succeed "50 years after everyone has stopped laughing."
Many have already stopped laughing, and some believe that the elevator could be built and be in operation by the middle of this century.
An American scientist, Bradley C. Edwards, has suggested creating a 100,000 km long paper-thin ribbon using a carbon nanotube composite material. He chose a ribbon type structure rather than a cable because that structure might stand a greater chance of surviving impacts by meteoroids. Supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, the work of Edwards was expanded to cover the deployment scenario, climber design, power delivery system,orbital debris avoidance, anchor system, surviving atomic oxygen, avoiding lightning and hurricanes by locating the anchor in the western equatorial Pacific, construction costs, construction schedule, and environmental hazards.
Travel to Earth orbital altitudes on the space elevator would be like a 10-hour train trip, with no extreme g-forces, no on-board fuel and none of the danger of explosions associated with rocket launches. A fully operational system of elevators could send people and goods into space cheaper, easier, safer and cleaner than with chemical rockets. Because space elevators could be built to any scale, there would be no practical limitations on payload size. Using a 2 1/2 -inch tether instead of a quarter-inch tether would allow the elevator to lift 100 times the weight, and could conceivably lift 40 shipping containers or the equivalent of three complete International Space Stations per day. Consider the cost and efficiency of a ferry versus a bridge here on Earth and then consider that the rocket ferries we use for space cargo today are just as cost-inefficient by comparison with the space elevator. The elevator system could cut the cost of putting a pound of cargo into space to $10 from $10,000 compared with about $1 to fly a pound on a jetliner. Among other things it is easy to imagine restaurants and hotels for space tourists, wind turbines attached to tethers generating power 24 hours a day, as well as a cheaper, easier and more environmentally friendly way to launch rockets to the moon and beyond.
The Japanese have announced their intention to build a space elevator and have earmarked $10 billion dollars for it's development!
I've established this website to serve as a reference and link to ongoing research and development for space elevators, to help popularize and promote the concept, and showcase my image galleries containing illustrations, some futuristic and fanciful, others more representative of current engineering concepts being discussed, that I have produced with a simple graphics program called Bryce5.
I'm also working on a short science fiction novel outlining the construction of the first commercial space elevator, with a timeline beginning in the mid-21st century, utilizing a system I call the 'Flinger', ( see image galleries ) a hybrid maglev catapult/scramjet system to deliver the large amount of construction materials required to orbit in an economical manner. This will be an illustrated e-novel, which I will eventually offer on this site as a pay-for-download.