String Technology

This is the maddest thing I've seen in a long line of mad things coming courtesy of the science community recently. I sometimes think certain "blue sky" research should actually be called "box of frogs" research for its madness. I'm suitably impressed:

A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line.
LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday.

The full article is available from New Scientist here.

In this case they've gone beyond the "blue sky" and into proper physical tests. For some reason it's giving me visions of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

I remember going through some of the technicalities when doing the particular spacey modules of my degree. It goes to prove that the simplest ideas really are the best as it's certainly a sound idea. Assuming you have cable strong enough and long enough to reach into geostationary orbit, there's no reason at all (to the best of my knowledge) that such a thing wouldn't work. LiftPort certainly seem to beleive it would.

The main restriction is the weight of cable as it gets longer and longer. It also has to be flexible enough to withstand wind and weather. Of course whatever is at the space-end of the ribbon would have to be able to slide up and down to some extent to compensate for fluctuations, apogee and perigee too, I'd guess. Once you're through the vast expense of getting the thing into place, though, you then have a relatively cheap, easy and lasting way of bumping things into space.

Rockets are so very 20th Century anyway.