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? How about an elevator? Some scientists are currently thinking about a space elevator. One end of the elevator would be attached to a satellite and the other end would be anchored someplace on Earth. Then when you wanted to go up into space or put something into orbit all you would do would be to press a button.

Sounds impossible? What would it take? It would take a very very strong cable. So strong it could lift thousands of pounds. It would take a very very long cable, probably about 100 miles long. Scientists can build very strong cables and one way to build a strong cable is using 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 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 they are really strong, about 100 times stronger than steel.

So step one in making a space elevator is to make a carbon nanotubes cable that is 44,000 miles long and hook one end to a satellite and the other end to the Earth. Sound impossible? Maybe not…… The next question is, could you drive your car up the space elevator?