The Audacious Space Elevator

Equatorial base sites are essential for space elevators because they align properly with geostationary orbits. In Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Fountains of Paradise, engineers built a space elevator on the mythical island of Taprobane, which was closely based on Sri Lanka, a real island near the southern tip of India. Clarke made one important change to the geography of Sri Lanka/Taprobane: he moved the island 800 km south so that it straddles the equator. At the moment, Sri Lanka lies between 6 and 10 degrees north. According to Smitherman, construction is not feasible today but it could be toward the end of the 21st century. "First we'll develop the technology," said Smitherman. "In 50 years or so, we'll be there. Then, if the need is there, we'll be able to do this. That's the gist of the report."

NASA The Eiffel Tower first inspired space elevator thoughts in 1895

Smitherman's paper credits Arthur C. Clarke with introducing the concept to a broader audience. In his 1978 novel, Fountains of Paradise, engineers construct a space elevator on top of a mountain peak in the mythical island of Taprobane (closely based on Sri Lanka, the country where Clarke now resides). The builders use advanced materials such as the carbon nanofibers now in laboratory study. "His book brought the idea to the general public through the science fiction community," said Smitherman. But Clarke wasn't the first.

As early as 1895, a Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky looked at the Eiffel Tower in Paris and thought about such a tower. He wanted to put a "celestial castle" at the end of a spindle shaped cable, with the "castle" orbiting the earth in a geosynchronous orbit (i.e. the castle would remain over the same spot on the earth). The tower would be built from the ground to an altitude of 35,800 kilometers. It would be similar to the fabled beanstalk in the children's story "Jack and the Beanstalk," except that on Tsiolkovsky's tower an elevator would ride up the cable to the "castle". Another Russian, a Leningrad engineer by the name of Yuri Artsutanov, wrote some of the first modern ideas about space elevators in 1960. Published as a non-technical story in Pravda, his story never caught the attention of the West. Science magazine ran a short article in 1966 by John Isaacs, an American oceanographer, about a pair of whisker-thin wires extending to a geostationary satellite. The article ran basically unnoticed. The concept finally came to the attention of the space flight engineering community through a technical paper written in 1975 by Jerome Pearson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. This paper was the inspiration for Clarke's novel.

Pearson, who participated in the 1999 workshop, envisions the space elevator as a cost-cutting device for NASA. "One of the fundamental problems we face right now is that it's so unbelievably expensive to get things into orbit," said Pearson. "The space elevator may be the answer."