Welcome to Elevator:2010's annual climber competition.

The single most difficult task in building the Space Elevator is achieving the required tether strength-to-weight ratio -- in other words, developing a material that is both strong enough and light enough to support the 60,000 mile long tether.

Compared to the best commercially available tether, we need a material that is almost 25 times better - about as great a leap as from wood to metal. Quite a tall order!

Luckily for us, about 15 years ago a new material was discovered, one that has the potential of fulfilling these seemingly impossible requirements. The material, Carbon Nanotubes, is only now becoming available from laboratories in its raw form in sufficient quantities.

The task ahead is to weave these raw CNTs into a useful form - a space worthy long tether.

The following chart illustrates quite well how far it is we have to go... We plot the competition results, as well as product spec sheets and published results against a hypothetical 50% yearly improvement curve. Can material strength match this curve? Will progress be steady and linear or will it be characterized by large improvements followed by years of no progress? Time will tell.

In order to encourage CNT laboratories to pay more attention to the Space Elevator (CNTs hold tremendous potential in other fields as well) we have posted an open dare to industry and academia: We will award a total of $900k this year, provided by NASA, to the teams that can come up with the best Space Elevator tether sample, provided that they can beat the best commercial tether on the market by a factor of 2 (approx 1 ton). Another $1.1M will be awarded to any team that can beat it by another factor of 1.5

The rules are simple. The task is not.

Tether competition - governing rules:

• Each tether must weigh a maximum of 2 grams.
• Each tether must be no shorter than 2 meters.
• The tethers can be no wider than 200 mm.
• The tethers will be pulled using two free-rolling pins.
• Tethers are rated by their load carrying capacity.
  
  
• For example:
  
  

  Material	Linear Density	Breaking Strength	Specific Strength
  	g/m	N	GPa-cc/g
  Centaurus 2005	2	5610	2.8
  AstoAraneae 2006	2	5960	3.01
  House 2006	3	~ 8000	~ 2.7
  Space Elevator CNT	2	200,000	100