I love this news report about the K.C. Space Pirates, and "Maryann," their climbing robot, which uses solar panels, and energy beamed from the ground via a laser beam shot through a special telescope, to climb half a mile up, on a cord attached to a helicopter hovering overhead. The D.I.Y. enthusiasm among these part-time innovators is breathtaking, and you gotta love an inventor who says things like:

So we'll be beaming more energy to our robot in this competition than has ever been beamed to a remote moving device ever. We'll be setting a variety of world records as we proceed in this competition.

This $2 million prize is for wireless power transmission, the second half of the Space Elevator Games — the first half being a "Tether Challenge" to create a material strong enough to carry materials into space.

Here's the somewhat cheesy news report on the Space Pirates and their quest for the $2 million space "booty":

Space Elevator image above by FlyingSinger on Flickr. [Fox4KC.com]

This weekend, Microsoft is hosting a Space Elevator Conference to discuss ways of making the Roald Dahl-esque dream a reality. And NASA is co-sponsoring the "Tether Challenge," aka the Space Elevator Games, as part of its Centennial Challenge, with contestants competing to devise a material strong enough to carry items up 62,000 miles — with the winner getting $2 million. Says NASA:

This is a challenge in materials engineering in which the tether provided by each team is subjected to a pull test. In order to win the $2 million prize, the tether must exceed the strength of the best available commercial tether by 50 percent with no increase in mass. A tether that can win this challenge would be a major step forward in materials technology. Such improved materials would have wide range of applications in space and on Earth. In past years the Tether Challenge was held in conjunction with the Power Beaming Challenge at an event called the Space Elevator Games. In 2009 the events will be separate. Some space enthusiasts see the potential of wireless power transmission and high-strength tethers being combined to realize the space elevator, a concept that would bring about a revolution in space activity. The space elevator and even space solar power may be many years away, but dramatic improvements in power beaming and tether materials that result from these challenges can lead to many near-term innovations in a wide range of fields.

This year the Tether Challenge will be held at the 2009 Space Elevator Conference in Redmond, Washington in August.

So far, early reports coming out of the conference suggest that people are still grappling with the challenges of creating a space elevator, which may still be decades away. But the development of carbon nanotubes is an encouraging sign. If we did have a space elevator, the prohibitive cost of getting people and materials into orbit — and exploring the solar system — would drop tremendously. But perhaps more importantly, it might also save our environment. Writes PC World:

Several of the experts agreed that one reason to build a low-cost transportation method is to build satellites for generating solar energy. "Solar-power satellites is really the biggest need to haul heavy stuff to geosynchronous altitude," said Keith Henson, founder of L5 Society.

[Bryan] Laubscher agreed, saying that space solar power will be the second big money-maker in space, after the existing communications market.

With a space elevator, you could build massive solar energy farms in orbit and send energy back to Earth, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels — just as long as you found a way to grapple with the ever-present peril of space junk, which would be constantly threatening to smash into your nice shiny elevator.

This is the Europa Platform, the largest space station in existence - and like the Phoenix Space Elevator, it's a target of Autumn Rain, a group that poses a threat to the very fabric of Williams' future society. (Click that link to see an amazing painting of the chaos that ensues when the space elevator crashes, burning, to Earth, after the Autumn Rain attack.)

Here's what Williams says about the space station image:

I'm particularly pleased with Randall MacDonald's Europa Platform artwork: most of the stuff that's out there featuring O'Neill cylinders dates all the way back to the 1970s, and Randall has cranked out some gorgeous stuff that feels oh-so-modern.

In The Burning Skies, the second book in Williams' future thriller series:

Life as U.S. counterintelligence agent Claire Haskell once knew it is in tatters-her mission betrayed, her lover dead, and her memories of the past suspect. Worse, the defeat of the mysterious insurgent group known as Autumn Rain was not as complete as many believed. It is quickly becoming clear that the group's ultimate goal is not simply to destroy the tenuous global alliances of the 22nd century-but to rule all of humanity. And they're starting with the violent destruction of the Net and the assassination of the U.S. president. Now it's up to Claire, with her ability to jack her brain into the systems of the enemy, to win this impossible war.

Battling ferociously across the Earth-Moon system, and navigating a complex world filled with both steadfast loyalists and ruthless traitors, Claire must be ready for the Rain's next move. But the true enemy may already be one step ahead of her.

It comes out on May 19, and we'll be reviewing it around then. Also on Williams' site: a terrific set of pictures of military hardware from the Second Cold War.

Long-predicted by science fiction authors, and memorably portrayed in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Red Mars (where a space elevator crashes to the planet's surface), a space elevator would pull people out of the atmosphere quickly - without wasting as much energy as rockets do as they escape Earth's gravity. The elevator would begin at the Earth's equator and could stretch up to an orbital platform or even a relocated asteroid. People who wanted to travel to space would ride the elevator far out of the atmosphere and catch a ship in orbit.

NASA holds regular competitions to inspire people to come up with materials that would make a space elevator possible, and the team behind the new ribbon material developed it for one of NASA's competitions. According to the Times Online:

Spurred on by a $4m (£2.7m) research prize from Nasa, a team at Cambridge University has created the world’s strongest ribbon: a cylindrical strand of carbon that combines lightweight flexibility with incredible strength and has the potential to stretch vast distances. The development has been seized upon by the space scientists, who believe the technology could allow astronauts to travel into space via a cable thousands of miles long — a space elevator . . .

The Cambridge team is making about 1 gram of the high-tech material per day, enough to stretch to 18 miles in length. “We have Nasa on the phone asking for 144,000 miles of the stuff, but there is a difference between what can be achieved in a lab and on an industrial level,” says Alan Windle, professor of materials science at Cambridge University, who is anxious not to let the work get ahead of itself.

The rest of the Times article is worth checking out - there's a lot of cool information about space elevators and their potential development over the next few decades.

Going Up . . . and the Next Floor is Outer Space [via Times Online]

Image via NASA

Klosterman writes:

As predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in 3001: The Final Odyssey, the orbiting luxury hotel is connected to Earth by a massive space elevator. Hyperstrong cables anchored to the earth near the equator (as required by physics) stretch 100,000 kilometers into the sky, rising into the hotel's lobby.

Now we just need him to design a space hotel. Would that hotel have the Hyperion adaptation On Demand? Ah, the future. We can dream. [Esquire]

Japan has made the development of space elevator technology a priority as part of the country's long-term space development plans. The Japan Space Elevator Association was created to promote and educate the public on the creation of a space elevator:

Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables — or flat ribbons — will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.

The JSEA believes that the entire space elevator could eventually be constructed for as little as one trillion yen (less than $10 billion). The elevator presents certain engineering challenges that have yet to be solved, but Japan is drawing on a wide range of industries to tackle them:

The biggest obstacle lies in the cables. To extend the elevator to a stationary satellite from the Earth's surface would require twice that length of cable to reach a counterweight, ensuring that the cable maintains its tension.

The cable must be exceptionally light, staggeringly strong and able to withstand all projectiles thrown at it inside and outside the atmosphere. The answer, according to the groups working on designs, will lie in carbon nanotubes - microscopic particles that can be formed into fibres and whose mass production is now a focus of Japan's big textile companies...

Equally, there is the issue of powering the carriages as they climb into space. “We are thinking of using the technology employed in our bullet trains,” Professor [Yoshio] Aoki said. “Carbon nanotubes are good conductors of electricity, so we are thinking of having a second cable to provide power all along the route.”

At July's 2008 Space Elevator Conference, the Japanese team made a splash by presenting a working model of a space elevator constructed from Lego blocks. The JSEA will be hosting its own space elevator conference in November and is working to launch its own space elevator games in 2009.

Japan hopes to turn sci-fi into reality with elevator to the stars [Times Online]