Welcome Instapundit readers…

I wondered why my traffic had spiked in the last couple of days – a mention from Glenn Reynolds / Instapundit will do that… 🙂

Welcome to the Space Elevator Blog!  Here I try and keep everyone up-to-date with all things Space Elevator related – I’m glad you stopped by.

In case you’re wondering, the Space Elevator is NOT a loony idea.  The physics are sound and the benefits of a Space Elevator, cheap and reliable access to space for huge quantities of just about anything you care to ship up there, are staggering.  Yes, the engineering challenges are formidable and the key ingredient, carbon nanotubes of sufficient strength and in sufficient number are not yet available.  But that’s what Engineers do with engineering challenges, they solve them.

The state of the art in engineering carbon nanotubes is advancing by leaps and bounds.  People I know and trust believe that carbon nanotube fibers with the quality needed to create a Space Elevator will be available in the next few years.

In addition to the engineering challenges, there will be legal issues, political issues and, of course, business issues to be addressed.  But where there are huge benefits and huge profits to be made (both possible with the Space Elevator), these issues can be overcome.  Stay tuned…

If the idea of the Space Elevator intrigues you, I urge you to put this blog into your RSS feed.  Two other sites which you should also check out are the Spaceward site (the home of the Space Elevator Games) and the Space Elevator Reference.

You might also want to consider attending the annual Space Elevator conference, sponsored this year by Microsoft, Black Line Ascension and Industrial Nano, being held at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, from July 18th through July 20th.

Finally, let me make you aware of the Space Elevator Games.  This is a 5 year challenge, sponsored with 4 million dollars of money from NASA.  There are two competitions, one in power-beaming and one in creating strong tethers.  Both of these technologies will be absolutely essential to build a space elevator and the Spaceward Foundation has partnered with NASA to promote these technologies/competitions.  This year is the fourth year of the challenge.  If you are interested in learning more about this, visit the Spaceward Foundation website.  If you’d like to see what happened at the games last year or the prior year, just do a search on this blog for 2007 Space Elevator Games or 2006 Space Elevator Games.

And thanks for reading…