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WASHINGTON - President Bush wants to return to the moon and put a man on Mars. But scientist Bradley C. Edwards has an idea that’s really out of this world: an elevator that climbs 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) into space. Edwards thinks an initial version could be operating in 15 years, a year earlier than Bush’s 2020 timetable for a return to the moon. He pegs the cost at $10 billion, a pittance compared with other space endeavors. “It’s not new physics — nothing new has to be discovered, nothing new has to be invented from scratch,” he says. “If there are delays in budget or delays in whatever, it could stretch, but 15 years is a realistic estimate for when we could have one up.” Edwards is not just some guy with an idea. He’s head of the space elevator project at the Institute for Scientific Research in Fairmont, W.Va. NASA already has given it more than $500,000 to study the idea, and Congress has earmarked $2.5 million more. “A lot of people at NASA are excited about the idea,” said Robert Casanova, director of the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts in Atlanta. Edwards believes a space elevator offers a cheaper, safer form of space travel that eventually could be used to carry explorers to the planets. Edwards’ elevator would climb on a cable made of nanotubes — tiny bundles of carbon atoms many times stronger than steel. The flat cable would be about 3 feet (1 meter) wide and thinner than a piece of paper, but capable of supporting a payload up to 13 tons. The cable would be attached to a platform on the equator, off the Pacific coast of South America where winds are calm, weather is good and commercial airplane flights are few. The platform would be mobile so the cable could be moved to get out of the path of orbiting satellites.
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