Up, up and away: The first climber, designed to carry 20 tonnes of cargo. Eventually larger climbers would carry 200 tonnes.

Credit: Photolibrary

THREE DECADES AGO, fledgling scientists and teenage technophiles began losing themselves in a novel by the late great science fiction icon Arthur C. Clarke. When they finally put the book down, they were dazzled by a vision of ordinary people rising into space. Many of them still think longingly of Clarke's book when they peer at the stars.

The Fountains of Paradise is the story of a maverick 22nd-century engineer who proposes building a 'space elevator' that would ascend more than 32,000 km. The ground floor of this elevator would be at the top of an equatorial mountain in the mythical country of Taprobane. The engineer has to battle a host of sceptics as well as wage a philosophical war with the monks who own the mountain.

Funnily enough, the first person to develop a detailed plan for a space elevator hadn't read Clarke's book. Nine years ago, Brad Edwards, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, was a little bored with the limitations of working at a huge government bureaucracy.

One day he read an article that declared it would be 300 years – if ever – before anyone had the materials or the capability to build a space elevator. Edwards had a bit of a track record for proving naysayers wrong, so this piqued his interest.

"My first thought was, 'Why can't it be built?'" says Edwards, now president of a Seattle, Washington, start-up company called Black Line Ascension, which conducts space elevator research and development. "I looked into it and threw out some of the concepts, like capturing an asteroid, that we don't have the technology to do. After that, I never found a good reason why it couldn't be done."

Edwards put together some calculations. Finally, he took a rough proposal for a space elevator to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a division that encouraged people outside the U.S. space agency to explore bizarre yet scientifically sound concepts that might be useful decades in the future. In 1999 NIAC awarded Edwards a phase-one grant of US$75,000 (A$80,017) over six months.

Impressed with the paper from his phase-one study in 2000, NIAC then gave him a two year grant of US$500,000 to continue working on the project. Edwards quit his job and devoted himself to the space elevator full time. He polished off his phase-two term with a co-authored book, The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System. It was a less poetic title than Clarke's, but it still caught the attention of the world's technology community.

Soon organisations such as the International Astronautical Congress and the American Society of Civil Engineers were holding sessions to discuss Edwards' plan. Space elevator conferences began attracting serious scientists.

The Spaceward Foundation was formed in 2004 to popularise the space elevator concept and accelerate research in its core technologies. A year later, a NASA program called Centennial Challenges offered large cash awards for the Space Elevator Games, in which competing teams build prototypes of space elevator components.

"The space elevator was viewed as science fiction until Brad's work," says Robert Cassanova, former director of NIAC, which closed due to budget cuts in 2007. "There are still lots of details to work out, but there are no major problems with the physics behind the idea. The physics tells us that if you can put this thing out there, it will work."

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