REDMOND, Wash. - Seattle is the home to the Space Needle. Despite its name, at 605 feet, it's nowhere near the edge of space.
As much as the human species has dreamed of building a stairway to the heavens, it's taken more than a half-century of rockets to actually get there. After all, space starts about 62 miles above the earth.
But the tower idea isn't dead. It's just gone high tech and there are still major hurdles to overcome. It's called a space elevator - a ribbon of lightweight, extremely strong material that a vehicle could ride up and down. Such a vehicle would be electrically powered, converting power from a laser beam into the juice to run motors.
How high would a space elevator need to be?
"About 100,000 kilometers or about 60,000 miles." says Ted Semon of the International Space Elevator Consortium.
The idea says Semon is not much different than swinging a weight at the end off a string around hour head. Centrifugal force keeps the string taut. And if the string of a space elevator tether stays taut, says Semon, a vehicle could ride up and down, carrying tons of construction materials into space to build things like space stations.
The consortium is meeting on the Microsoft campus this weekend. The highlight of Friday night is a competition between teams of people trying to overcome what many here consider the biggest technological hurdle of the elevator project -- making a fiber strong enough to hold the weight of tons, yet be light enough to be extended to the extraordinary lengths
The current champion is a Japanese made fiber called Zylon.
"To build a space elevator, we need a material five times stronger than this," says Ben Shelef with the Spaceward Foundation.
At stake in the competition are grants totaling $2 million put up by NASA. The U.S. space agency is very interested in the potential of the elevator.
NASA representative Andy Petro didn't give out any checks Friday, but says the agency will keep encouraging this kind of innovation from small entrepreneurs.
"It's really hard for a large company or a large organization like NASA to generate the kind of innovation we really need." says Petro.
But making the fiber isn't the only hurdle. Weather on the ground is a factor as is junk in space. Because all that junk could cut a think cable, a space tether would likely be a three-foot wide ribbon, but thinner than a piece of paper. The idea is that if it's mounted at the correct angle, the tether would be pierced but not taken out by collisions with space junk.
To add a comment, please register or login.