THOMAS BLETSO, NEWCASTLE
COULD WE REALLY BUILD A SPACE ELEVATOR?
A normal traction elevator uses a cable to winch a cabin up and down between floors inside a building. There's a counterweight on the other end of the cable to make moving the cabin easier. You step into the cabin, press a button and are winched to the desired floor by an electric motor. As you go up, the counter weight goes down and vice versa.
A space elevator, as you might imagine, takes this idea a bit further. It relies on a cable that runs from space to Earth thousands of metres of cable. Instead of needing a rocket to go into space, you run a cabin up the cable, which uses a fraction of the energy of a rocket launch and causes no pollution. Sounds impossible, but people have been giving this some serious thought over the years.