From: Monte Davis 

"Frank Haber"  wrote:

>And if/when they happen, I wonder how they'll check Fullerene materials
>stability under space levels of gamma rays, cosmic rays, neutrinos, antiquarks
>and other stuff I just made up (g).

There are (and have been for years) interesting things to do in space with
long lightweight "tethers." You may remember the Shuttle
experiment which deployed one vertically, so it swept through the earth's
magnetic field and generated power, also lowering the orbit slightly; that
can be worked in the other direction too, feeding power from solar cells
into such a tether to raise the orbit without fuel.

Or you could set a more massive tether in orbit, spinning like a bola, and
use its angular momentum to raise/accelerate payloads. There have been
schemes to combine such a "rotovator" with some kind of
air-breathing scramjet that makes rendezvous and transfers cargo at the top
of an arc 100 miles up. While the numbers are better than rocket launch to
orbit, the rendezvous would be a lot faster and dicier than mid-air
refueling -- and building cost-effective "hyperplanes" is tough
enough that it always bothers me to make that a subsidiary part of
something harder :-)

While either one could in principle be done with existing high-strength
fibers like Kevlar or Spectra, they'd be easier with stronger/lighter CNT
materials -- and would double as a long-duration exposure test, at lower
cost and risk than the all-up space elevator.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5