with a little spin....

with a little spin....

A team at Cambridge-MIT Institute has developed a way to make continuous Carbon nanotube thread at a rate of several centimeters per second. From what I understand of the process, a Carbon-rich aerogel is created in a special spinning furnace chamber, then the resulting nanofibers are wound into a thread on a spindle.

The Cambridge team is nowhere near the theoretical maximum tensile strength of nanotubes, but they expect to increase the strength of the thread by an order of magnitude in the next year.

This is fantastic news for anyone interested in a space elevator as a low-cost, heavy-lift, earth-to-orbit alternative to rockets. For a space elevator to work, a very strong material is required: a tensile strength of at least 65 GPa at a minimum. Carbon nanotubes have a theoretical maximum of 300 GPa, so there is plenty of margin to make the material stronger and stronger once we get past 65.

The big thing though is the length of fibres that will make up the space elevator "ribbon". Industrial processes such as this spinning technique are essential to producing a ribbon in excess of 100 thousand km long (it will pass right through geostationary earth orbit, with the ~60000 km beyond GEO acting as counterweight to the 35000 or so km hanging below GEO).