Sunday, February 26, 2006

Yet more science fiction becoming fact

One of my favourite books by Arthur C Clarke, is The Fountains of Paradise. I read this in my teenage years and was inspired by the theory of the "Space Elevator", where cars, running down a magnetic track anchored between an asteroid in orbit to a ground station on Earth, generate electricity to power cars rising up the same cable. Such a system would make traveling into low Earth orbit, cheap affordable and relatively safe, when compared to sitting on top of a chemically powered rocket.

Like almost all of Clarke's novels, the idea had a solid foundation in fact and only lacked the technical capability of its time to implement. One of the things I love about good science fiction is seeing the some of this scientific dreaming become reality. Consequently, I was delighted to read this article about a real project to build a Space Elevator by 2018 and a recent successful test by a private company LiftPort which involved a 6 mile high cable tethered to a balloon and a robotic lifter which managed to climb 460m up the cable.

I'll watch this project with interest...

1 comment:

Brian Dunbar said...

Keep a close eye on us. The nature of our progress is incremental - build, test, repair, test. Each step by itself is non-dramatic and builds on the progress of what came before.

What is truly interesting from my point of view is that this is the kind of project that seems to just happen. Reminds of bands who are an 'overnight success' after toiling on the bar circuit for a dozen years.