LAS CRUCES, N.M. — On a windy expanse of the Chihuahuan Desert, the gangly 22-pound contraption began to climb up a thin carbon-fiber belt hung from a crane.
Directed toward the craft from the ground was an array of 135 mirrors that concentrated the New Mexico light to an intensity equal to 300 suns. The beam shined on the climber's high-efficiency solar cells. With a muffled whirring, it rose 35 feet.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday October 27, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 52 words Type of Material: Correction
Space elevator: An Oct. 19 article in Section A about a NASA-sponsored competition for space elevator technologies described Matthew Abrams as the lone member of the StarClimber team. He was the only member present at the competition in New Mexico. The team also includes Ash Gokhale, who helped design the StarClimber entry.
Only 22,000 miles to go.
The solar-powered elevator car, dubbed the Jolly Roger, is one of a dozen prototypes from around the world for a device that could lift humans and cargo into geostationary orbit aboard a futuristic space elevator.
It's an admittedly bizarre idea, but NASA has taken it seriously enough to host a global competition here this week, offering $150,000 to the team that can lift the most weight to the top of a 200-foot tether in the shortest time.
Instead of carrying heavy fuel, the machines must get their energy beamed onboard from sources such as sunlight, microwaves or lasers. That energy is then converted to electricity to drive the crafts' motors.
NASA is also backing a related contest to find a material strong enough to support an elevator whose top floor is marked "S" for "space."
Aerospace giants like Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. haven't taken the idea seriously, but NASA is seeking inspiration from the general public through its Centennial Challenge program.
The origin of the space elevator seems to trace back to 1960, when Russian Yuri Artsutanov proposed hanging a ribbon from space to transport material into orbit, said Roger Gilbertson of the Spaceward Foundation, which is coordinating the elevator competition for NASA.
The idea took off when science-fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke used it as the basis for his 1979 novel, "The Fountains of Paradise."
Clarke described an umbilical built out of "a continuous pseudo-one dimensional diamond crystal" a few microns thick. The tether stretched from the fictional equatorial island of Taprobane to a satellite in geostationary orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. In this type of orbit, an object will stay fixed above the equator.
The space elevator quickly ascended into the pantheon of far-out sci-fi ideas, right up there with warp speed and teleportation.
But in the late 1990s, scientists began taking the idea seriously, after some experts said carbon nano-tubes might be strong enough to serve as the space elevator tether.
