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Space Elevator to the Solar System and beyond. Built from a incredibly thin and extremely long atomic chain, linking the Earth to an Orbiting Asteroid, and able to lift cargo at an extremely low cost as compared with rockets.¹

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO — Make way for the ultimate high-rise project: the space elevator. Long viewed as science fiction “imagineering”, researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality.²

David Smitherman of NASA/Marshall’s Advanced Projects Office has compiled plans for such an elevator that could turn science fiction into reality. His publication, “Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium”, is based on findings from a space infrastructure conference held at the Marshall Space Flight Center last year.³

In the future, you may be able to. That’s the hope of the hundreds of space elevator enthusiasts who will touch down later this month at the Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., to attend the third annual international space elevator conference.⁴

Is it possible to make a cable for a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes? Not anytime soon, if ever, says Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy.⁵

Though the idea to build a space elevator was introduced several decades ago by fiction writers and scientists, no one managed to build one yet. Experts at Beam Power Challenge hope to find a key at least to an answer of getting the power to the space elevator.⁶