Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
Space elevators?!
Recent concepts for a space elevator are notable for their plans to use carbon nanotube or boron nitride nanotube based materials as the tensile element in the tether design, since the measured strength of carbon nanotubes appears great enough to make this possible.
This is the best part:
"Construction is conceived as the deployment of a long cable from a large spool. The spool is initially parked in a geostationary orbit above the planned anchor point. When a long cable is dropped "down" (toward Earth), it must be balanced by balancing mass being dropped "up" (away from Earth) for the whole system to remain on the geosynchronous orbit."
–