Space Elevator
Posted 1 year, 1 month ago at 11:56 am. 0 comments
Like the elevator in your apartment building but going slightly higher. NASA is providing 1 million dollars in prize money to anyone who can build a prototype space elevator. Yet for the third year in a row no individual or company has claimed the money. Can it not be build? According to NASA it can, and other proponents are certain technologies are under development right now. The elevator would transport supplies from Earth to space without needing expensive fuel or batteries of any kind. Currently supplies have to be loaded onto space shuttles or Soyuz transport vehicles and then launched using very expensive, and dated, technology. NASA remains hopeful that in the near future they can pay out the prize money.
For the third time in three years, no team has claimed the prize money in two NASA- sponsored technology challenges to build a robotic climber and a vertical tether that could one day comprise a workable space elevator. In theory, that elevator would transport supplies from the ground to space without expensive fuel or batteries.
Despite the letdown, proponents of the technology were hopeful, and the roughly $1 million in prize money will roll over to next year’s events.
“The good news is that technologies to build a space elevator are possible and are being developed now,” said Ted Semon, spokesman for the Spaceward Foundation, which hosted NASA challenges at The Spaceward Games 2007, which began Oct. 17 and ended Monday in Salt Lake City.
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 also 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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