The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System

Rating:
Summary: Want a Lift?
Review: After the latest shuttle disaster, the challenge of obtaining cheap (and safe) access to space now occupies NASA's attention more than ever before. If humans are ever to realize the dream of space--exploration, commercialization and settlement on a massive scale--then we need to find a means to climb out of the earth's steep gravity well that is reliable and relatively inexpensive.

Dr. Bradley Edwards has studied this problem and his solution is a space elevator, an idea that until recently has attracted the attention more of science fiction writers than working scientists.

This book, while suffering in places from lapses in style and clear presentation, manages admirably to describe the basic details of Edwards's reformulation of the space elevator concept. Non-scientists will have no problem following the argument.

The key to this contemporary scientific and engineering study of the feasibility of a space elevator is the discovery in the early 1990's of carbon nanotubes. Their physical properties of extreme tensile strength and light weight make them an ideal candidate for playing the role of that elusvive material, "unobtainium". Of course it still remains to be see whether they can be formed into a composite that has the requisite characteristics that will permit the construction of a tether 100,000 kilometers long stretching from earth to well beyond geostationary orbit.

An excellent introduction to what we all hope will be the 21st century's CATS pyjamas!

Rating:
Summary: First phase of a blueprint for the defense of planet earth
Review: Every year geologists and meteorite hunters find more evidence that the moon and the earth share a common fate in the shooting gallery of our solar system. As the picture of a meteorte strike on the moon in 1954 and the 1994 levy-shoemaker-9 comet strike on our solar systems comet sink, Jupiter demonstrate, we are vulnerable to catastrophic attacks from comets and asteroids that cross the earth's orbit. Chicsulube,Mexico, Chesapeake Bay,us, the meteor crater in arizonia,us, sites in Canada and Russia, even the British offshore oil fields show that we have been hit in the past.
The French mathematician Poissian postulated that it can happen again next week and next month afterwards. One need only remember the lady who won the New Jersey lottery TWICE to understand just how fickle lady chance can be.
The space elevator offers the only economically feasible method to date that could lift the necessary material and manpower to address this very real threat.
The fullerenes 160 Giga-Pascals loading limit need to be attacked with the same urgency of the manhattan project.
The author's do slightly address this issue but they missed a major use for this (SE) technology.
The book reads like a college term paper and even looks like it was xeroxed from one. What it has to say is beautiful and needs to be fleshed out into an encyclopedia of future spacefaring that will make the currect economic sluggishness seem almost a welcome thing.
Look for the stock market to grab nanotechnology ie (fullerenes)in 5 years or so and hype it to the nines.

Rating:
Summary: A Worthy Project
Review: In approximately 200 pages, Dr. Edwards and Eric Westling describe us with scientific bias and a clear language how a Space Elevator can be built with current technology and a manageable budget. Even the most skeptic reader finishes the book wondering on the possibilities of something that some hours (or days) before considered impossible. A must read for every space advocate that sees in the stars our future.

Rating:
Summary: Thrilling and entertaining
Review: The authors managed to convince me in a very short time that Edwards' plan of a Space Elevator could indeed be feasible in a very short time from now (given only a few technological breakthroughs yet to be achieved).

The layout of the book is utterly sophomoric, even more of a surprise as Edwards apparently had a professional writer at hand to co-author the book. These guys have obviously never heard anything about LaTeX or other quality type setting systems that are, mind you, standard in the maths/engineering scientific community. The readibility of the formulae suffers most, and the presentation of the tables and figures is a disgrace as well.

Some readers might find the prose is lacking in style, although I quite liked the colloquial approach (I must say that I'm not a native speaker of English, so if I was I might be annoyed as well). The structure of the chapters would profit from quite some refactoring, too.

Still the sheer amount of information provided is impressive and the authors do a great job in convincing even the most sceptical of the feasibility of this project by tackling most, if not all, of the problems at hand with great skill.

I strongly recommend this book to anybody with an interest in space-faring, science fiction or just great technological ideas that should rather be realized today than tomorrow.

Rating:
Summary: Great as an introduction
Review: The collaborative effort of physicist Bradley C. Edwards and professional science writer Eric A. Westling, The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-To-Space Transportation System is an unusually accessible technical engineering study exploring the possibility of reaching out into space itself. Packed from cover to cover with theories, charts, tables, calculations, and scientific explanations, The Space Elevator is both an optimistic and an eye-opening look at what could be possible in the very near future.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating ideas, presentation needs work
Review: This book discusses what appears, to my inexpert eyes at least, to be a well thought-out, comprehensive, and entirely feasible (with one caveat --keep reading for more details) plan for building a space elevator, and its promise to transform escaping from Earth's gravity well from a risky and costly event to a mundane, routine, and above all affordable enterprise. It has convinced me that the idea is one well worth pursuing.

The one big caveat on the book's thesis is that nobody has, as yet, demonstrated material strong enough to build it. Whilst the carbon nanotubes the book bases its assumptions on do indeed exist, as of writing this review noone has even been able to form them into some kind of composite to achieve anything like the strength required. The authors optimistically assume such problems will be quickly overcome - perhaps a necessary assumption for their purposes but one to keep in mind.

Given the quality of the thought that has gone into the book, it is a shame that the presentation sometimes lets the book down. The prose is badly written at times, and could do with some resectioning and summaries of key points so that less technically-inclined readers can grasp the key points without getting loss in the morass of engineering detail.

However, for those interested in how space could be dramatically opened up in the medium-term future, this book is very much worth a read. With any luck, a second edition will be able to report on the progress in nanotube research as well as improve the presentation!