The Space Elevator

Mankind has been building high structures since the Pyramids in Egypt. Since then taller and higher structures has been built surpassing that height. In 2010, the new record for the tallest building was set by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai(829.84 m). As I can remember, the record for the highest structures has been set and reset many times just in the past few years. This makes me wonder - How far up can we go?

Well, a quick check with Google(and Youtube) surprised my curiousity. As it turns out,  it is posible to build structures that can go up to space!

The only limitation of builiding one today is an abundant material available strong enough to support such weight.

The idea of space elevator was popularized in the late 1970's in the book The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clark. But the main idea of building an elevator to space can go further back to Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky since the start of the Eiffel Tower or perhaps even further back to the tales of Jack climbing the beanstalk or Rapunzel letting down her hair, the building of Tower of Babel, or as early as the first man who dreamed of climbing to the skies.

In the 1960's to the 70's, this was realized when we rocketed astronauts to the moon, but since then conventional space launch using rocket fuel was just too costly to further realize.

The recent discovery of carbon nanotubes makes the dream of building the space elevator  now one step closer to reality and away from the science fiction. As soon as this dream is realized, It will propel space programs back to new heights after being stagnant.

In February 2012, a Japanese construction firm Obayashi Corporation announced that in 38 years it could build a space elevator using carbon nanotube technology. According to Obayashi, a 30-seaters space elevator will be made of carbon nanotube, The whole length of the elevator cable is expected to be 96,000 kilometers. At a speed of 200 kilometers per hour, passenger will be able to reach the terminal satellite which is 36,000 kilometers up high after a 7.5 days trip

As of today, there are many groups both privately funded and government owned project continuing research that would contribute soon in the building of this elevator.