“The first thought is, Is this really going to work?” said Dr. Steven E. Patamia, a researcher at Los Alamos, who was enlisted into performing space elevator calculations a week before the conference. “When you get into it, it begins to make sense. There are a good number of technical issues. They are probably all `overcomeable.’ “

“There’s a clear path to building this,” said Dr. Edwards, director of research at the Institute for Scientific Research. “It’s gotten to the point where we can say it’s closer to $6 billion than $600 billion.” Building subsequent elevators would be cheaper, at $2 billion each, because the first elevator could lift the required materials. By comparison, the estimated cost of building and operating the International Space Station is expected to exceed $100 billion.

“What a wonderful idea if you could ever make it work,” said Gentry Lee, the chief engineer of planetary flight systems at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (better known to most of us for his sci-fi novels, including his collaborations with Arthur C. Clarke), who pushed for financing Dr. Edwards’s initial studies. “It is plausible. It is not implausible. I think that the idea has so much promise a couple of million dollars a year aimed at the enabling technologies is not too much to ask.”

At the conference, scientists presented their calculations that examined details. Vibrations in the elevator ribbon, which would act like an extremely long plucked guitar string, appeared manageable. Dr. Anders Jorgensen of Los Alamos raised concerns that as the ribbon swung around through the Earth’s magnetic field, it would create strong electric currents. But a larger problem could be that due to the elevator’s relatively slow pace, any human passengers might receive dangerous amounts of radiation as they passed through pockets of high-energy particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. Dr. Edwards said that the first space elevator would be built to carry only cargo, not people, and that the dangers could be reduced on subsequent elevators by speeding them up or providing shielding through magnetic fields.

Mr. Clarke, who came up with the idea of using satellites in geosynchronous orbit for communications long before any were launched, thinks that he might live to see to live this science fiction idea come true too. “I’m 86 now, so in 20 years’ time, I’ll only be 106. So maybe I will see it.”

Related Past SciScoop stories:

Raising Funds for a Space Elevator, And Other Projects
Space Elevator May Benefit From Shuttle Disaster
The Business of Building a Space Elevator