This is intriguing: Scientists at Glasgow University have won funding from the European Space Agency to examine the feasibility of building a slingshot that could fire supplies direct to the moon and retrieve cargo coming down the other way. A rotating network of cables would be set up in low earth orbit into which material […]

As we have discussed recently here and here (and in our latest edition of FastForward Radio), push prizes are making things happen. Maybe they won’t singlehandedly save the world, but then again, when you read something like this… A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling […]

Arthur C. Clarke agrees that we shouldn’t use rockets to go back to the Moon. Explorers, he said, made it to the South Pole before the technology existed to make it practical to stay there. They used dog sleds because that was the best method available. After that first dangerous trip, it took fifty years […]

At 60.6 kilometres per hour, the elevator described here is the world’s fastest. But I think we’ll need to do quite a bit better than that (speedwise) for the really big elevator. Be sure to read the whole article, includng a neat run-down on some of the coolest eleavtors from the world of science fiction. […]