Jen and I were on our way to Boston for wedding number two. Her cousin Scott got married last Sunday at a beautiful resort in Cape Cod. There was an excellent eight piece live band at the reception that made for some exceptional dancing. The various vocalists played everything from Barry White to Outkast, Sinatra to the Brian Setzer Orchestra. And they played it very well. A good live band creates an atmosphere that a DJ just can’t compete with. You can check these guys out at www.bostonplayers.com and even listen to samples of their music.

On the flight to Boston I picked up one of the magazines that are always shoved in the back of the seat in front of you. Coincidently there was a multiple page article on Syracuse outlining everything from the nightlife in Armory Square to the future development of Destiny USA. Follow that link and take a look at some of their promo videos. It’s pretty funny how dramatic the marketing campaigns can be. You’d never know that a mall could alter your life in such amazing ways…

However, it wasn’t the article on Syracuse that got my full attention, it was an article titled “Next Stop: Earth Orbit”. I ended up coaxing Jen into letting me smuggle magazine into her baggage before we left the plane so that I could continue reading about the subject, even though later on I found out that taking the magazines is actually encouraged by the airline… Much like the Gideon Bible.

Several decades ago a novel by Aurthur C. Clarke sparked the imagination of many readers when he proposed the idea of a “Space Elevator” that could take ordinary people into space. Only eight years ago a physicist who hadn’t been exposed to the idea in Clarke’s book, took the concept very seriously and the research and competition to make the science fiction a reality has since taken off. There have been grants given for hundreds of thousands of dollars and competitions with rewards equal to that money held annually to further the technology. Today hundreds of scientists devote some time and effort to develop the technology so that construction on a space elevator can begin as soon as 2010.

The goal of a space elevator is to create an alternate method of transporting people or material into space. According to the article it costs $10,000 to transport one pound of cargo into space by rocket. This expense has made it difficult for man to really stretch his space legs and all but a impossible for even above average civilians to share the experience. A significantly cheaper mode of transportation into space would give us access to an environment with unimaginable potential. As Arthur C. Clarke stated in an anology, “…If you had intelligent fish arguing about why they should go out on dry land, some bright young fish might have thought of many things but they would never have thought of fire, and I think that in space we will find things as useful as fire.”

There are several potential methods of creating a lift with the ability to reach into space. Two prominent concepts are a tower stabilized by a space fountain and a tether that a lift could attach to. The latter is what this article focused on. The technology includes an incredibly long strand of carbon nanotubes that would be anchored to earth and stretch 62,000 miles into space where it would be connected to a counterweight in geosynchronous orbit. Like swinging a ball on a string, centrifugal force would keep the tether taught, allowing for a transport to be attached which could then make the long climb into space. To give you a frame of reference, the circumference of the earth is around 25,000 miles so you can imagine how long this would take at slow speeds. For instance, at 120 mph it would still take 22 days to reach the end of the lift.

Once the transport broke the grip of earth’s gravity, ships could then be launched deeper into space, material could be off-loaded and used to build stations, telescopes and satellites could be released to explore deep-space, all at a fraction of the cost of conventional means and with significantly less danger involved. The scientific community hopes to have a functional elevator ready by 2020 with a cost of about $10 billion and is banking on advances in single walled carbon nanotube technology to make this fiction non-fiction. You can find out more about these concepts here!