There was another $2 Million targeted towards Carbon Nanotube Research…

Occasionally, FeedDemon provides me with old articles that are very interesting.  Case in point…

Many readers will remember the Space Elevator Games, the 5 year partnership between NASA and The Spaceward Foundation, to further research and development in the fields of power-beaming and strong tethers.  The Power-Beaming games were a spectacular success, resulting in several years of exciting and photogenic competition and culminating in the winning of $900,000 by the good folks at LaserMotive.  The Strong Tether challenge was NOT a success however.  Even the promise of $2 Million in prize money provided by NASA failed to produce any competitors with entries approaching the strength of conventional materials, let alone surpassing them.  Those of us like myself who were involved in those games (and then tried, unsuccessfully to get them restarted under the auspices of ISEC) spent a lot of time theorizing and supposing why this was so.  I think at the end of the day, it was just a much tougher nut than anyone had initially thought.

An article which just popped up in my FeedDemon reader showed that another approach was taken by the sporting goods company Jas. D. Easton, Inc.  In 2009, the same year that LaserMotive won their prize, Jas. D. Easton awarded $2 Million (there’s that number again) to the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science to fund research on advanced carbon materials for sports equipment and aerospace applications.  One of my arguments to support The Space Elevator Games Strong Tether Competition to skeptics was that even if you don’t think a Space Elevator is feasible or a good idea, there certainly would be a myriad of applications for a super-strong material such as carbon nanotubes promise to be – it would be a true game-changer in every sense of the word.

I know that UCLA continues to be a leader in CNT research and a professor from UCLA has presented at the University of Cincinnati’s CNT workshop.  Alas, it doesn’t appear that they have come up with anything revolutionary yet but hope springs eternal…