..::Ima-Jena-tion::..

Hi, I got something interesting that I want to share with u all . Space may still be the final frontier, but getting there could soon be almost as simple as stepping into the office lift at the start of the day.
The race is on to build the first "space elevator' - long dismissed as science fiction - to carry people and materials into orbit along a cable thousands of miles long. Supporters of the elevator concept promise a future in space that is both cheap and accessible, and contrast it to Nasa's announcement last week that it will be relying on 40-year-old technology from the Apollo programme for its $105 billion plan to return to the Moon by 2018.

The companies behind the space elevator say they will be able to lift material into orbit for as little as $400 a pound, compared with $20,000 a pound using existing rockets. That would open up the possibility of tourists visiting a sky hotel in stationary orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth, with a view previously enjoyed only by astronauts. It would also allow for far cheaper travel to the Moon and other planets within the solar system, since most of the energy required by rockets is used simply to escape Earth's gravity.

Russian scientists first envisaged a fixed link to space, and the idea was popularized by the British sci-fi writer and vision-ary, Arthur C Clarke, in his 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise.

The theory behind the space elevator is deceptively simple. With a base station on Earth and an orbiting satellite, solar-powered "climbers'', each carrying up to 20 tons, would crawl up a single cable into space over several days. The cable would be held up by the rotation of a 600-ton satellite counter-weight, much like a heavy object at the end of a spinning rope.

Scientists believe that a material known as carbon nanotubes could be bound together to make a ribbon, rather than a cable, three-feet across but just half the width of a pencil. A number of companies, including GE and IBM, are currently developing nanotubes, which are microscopic cylinders of carbon. In one experiment, a sheet of nanotubes one-thousandth the thickness of a human hair could support 50,000 times its own mass.

Brad Edwards, a board member of the foundation, says the initial development could be ready "in the next couple of years", with the elevator itself being built in another decade.
"We are talking about getting this up in about 15 years,'' Dr Edwards predicted.