Russia to build lunar base and space elevator?

In a recent posting on TechTakeaway.com, the author claims that “Transporting goods from earth to the moon and back has caused problems to efforts colonize the Moon, Russia plans to solve this with an ambitious space elevator project.”  They accompany this short article with an artists conception picture of an earth-based space elevator.

Frankly, I don’t think so, and have contacted the authors for more information.

Their source may be the two articles I had blogged about earlier (here and here), but the Space Elevators discussed in those two articles were based in outer space, in both lunar and earth orbit.

But I’d love to be wrong.  Maybe we’ll finally have a “Tsar-way to Heaven” after all (apologies to Led Zeppelin)…

(01MAY2007 Update – I heard back from the editors and yes, indeed, they did get their story from the articles I mentioned.  I sent an email back to them, letting them know of the miscommunication.)

3 thoughts on “Russia to build lunar base and space elevator?

  1. from Russia

    AFAIK you are right and there is no space elevator project in Russia.

    You know, the biggest problem is strength of tether. In NASA competition tether must have weight of 2 g and length of 2 m. In such conditions good steel tether carrying capacity is about 4.4 kg, Astroaranea tether – 596 kg.

    The carrying capacity of tether from russian Space Research Institute is about 22 kg. Alas, not good enough!

  2. Michael Laine

    OMG! did you really write ‘tsar-way to heaven’? i am laughing out loud about that, and disturbing the people in the coffee shop around me. 🙂 its beena long time since i’ve heard an ORIGINAL SE joke. usually its just the run of the mill ‘pushing all the buttons, or elevator music or fart jokes… but tsar-way is brilliant!

    hey, seriously, point to hoyts blog again. he needs help looking for his string in the sky…

    thanks. mjl

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