The Space Elevator Games

What is a Space Elevator?

To put it simply, a space elevator is exactly what it sounds like: an elevator to space. Since its first proposal in the 1960’s by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov, several different elevator designs have been proposed. The one most commonly used today is that designed by Bradley Edwards, the former Director of Research for the Institute for Scientific Research (ISR).

In essence the elevator is a 62,000 mile long cable reaching into space. The cable is about 3 feet in width. It is anchored at the bottom aboard a ship, and has a counterweight at the top of the cable, beyond the earth’s orbit. The cable is kept taut and in place due to the rotation of the earth.

Specially designed machines called climbers (because they climb up the cable) then move up and down on the elevator, delivering payloads to the top before returning. It is estimated that these climbers could easily make one return trip a day on the elevator. They would operate on solar power as well as a ground based booster light source.

Once in place, the entire set-up would be fairly cheap to maintain and operate. It would provide a complete revolution in the area of space development, as it would dramatically reduce costs for getting materials out of the earth’s orbit. The primary resource used by currently used rockets is the fuel needed to escape the earth’s orbit. Eliminating this need would completely change the way that space exploration and development is run and understood.

Developments in the Space Elevator

When the idea of a space elevator was first introduced in the 1960’s, it was based on firm scientific and engineering principles. For all intents and purposes it could easily be done, save one factor: there was no material then strong enough that could be used in the manufacturing of such a massively long cable.

In 1991 a new discovery in the world of nanotechnology changed all that. Carbon Nanotubes (CNT) provided the answer. It is speculated that composite materials constructed from CNT would be up to four times stronger than would be required to build the elevator.