{"id":1610,"date":"2014-04-24T03:47:53","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T08:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1610"},"modified":"2014-04-27T03:59:24","modified_gmt":"2014-04-27T08:59:24","slug":"googlex-and-the-space-elevator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1610","title":{"rendered":"GoogleX and the Space Elevator"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article that has been making the rounds recently seems to confirm that GoogleX, once upon a time, was interested in building a Space Elevator.\u00a0 This story has been reported in several outlets but they all seem to come from this story<\/a> at Fast Company. <\/a><\/p>\n

Money quote from the article:\u00a0 “The [GoogleX] team knew the cable would have to be exceptionally strong– ‘at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have,’ by \u00adPiponi’s calculations. He found one material that could do this: carbon nanotubes. But no one has manufactured a perfectly formed carbon nanotube strand longer than a meter.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, indeedy, that is the<\/strong> stumbling block.\u00a0 If someone is truly interested in getting closer to the day when a Space Elevator could be built, I would recommend that they invest in Materials Science research; carbon nanotubes, boron-nitride nanotubes, carbyne, it doesn’t matter which one, just as long as the goal is stronger materials.<\/p>\n

Many months ago, I contacted Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, to see if they would be interested in sponsoring a rebirth of the Strong Tether Competition.\u00a0 I thought their (at the time) rumored interest in the Space Elevator coupled with their deep pockets would be a natural fit.\u00a0 Sadly they were not interested.\u00a0 When this article surfaced, I contacted Mr. Teller again and he confirmed that GoogleX is not currently working on this project, sigh.<\/p>\n

So, it’s nice to know that they were interested, once upon a time, but we will need to continue to look elsewhere for the breakthough needed to make this project a reality…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article that has been making the rounds recently seems to confirm that GoogleX, once upon a time, was interested in building a Space Elevator.\u00a0 This story has been reported in several outlets but they all seem to come from this story at Fast Company. Money quote from the article:\u00a0 “The [GoogleX] team knew the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}