Space, the final frontier. But, is space really that far away? Space beings at only about 70 miles away from the surface of the Earth. If you could drive straight up into the air in a car, you would reach space in less than two hours. Just this year a group of people flew a plane to the closest reaches of space and won a twenty million dollar prize. Someday that sort of trip might be common. But is there another way to get to space?

What about an elevator? Some scientists are currently thinking about a space elevator. One end of the elevator would be attached to a satellite or a space station and the other end would be anchored someplace on Earth. When you want to go up into space or put something into orbit, all you would have to do would be to press a button. Impossible? What would it take? First of all, it would take a very very strong cable. A cable so strong that it could lift thousands of pounds. It would also take a very very long cable, probably about 100 miles long. One way to build a strong cable is to use carbon nanotubes.

Carbon nanotubes were discovered about 15 years ago by a Japanese scientist Sumio Iijima who looked inside of a furnace at some black crud. When he looked at the crud with a very powerful microscope he saw long skinny strings that were a thousand times thinner than a single human hair. They were just 2 nanometers across. A nanometer is one-billionth (1/1,000,000,000) of a meter. Now we can make carbon nanotubes that are thousands if not millions of times longer than they are wide. And these nanotubes are really strong, about 100 times stronger than steel.

So the first step in building a space elevator is to make a cable of carbon nanotubes that is 44,000 miles long. Hook one end of the cable to a satellite and the other end to the Earth, and voila! Sounds impossible? Maybe not……

Some day, space may only be an elevator away.

Image Source: Paul DiMare | Satellite Signals