My thoughts on Space Elevators

• Simulating a space elevator break.
• Some annoying problems that need to be tackled.
• Why the Space Elevator's Center of Mass is not at Geosynchronous altitude
• Climbers letting go of the elevator
• Off-Equator Space Elevators

Conferences

ISEC 2025, Virtual, September 6-7 2025

I presented a couple of talks (this was way too much work):

• A Review of ERA5 Equatorial Wind Data and Impact on a Space Elevator.
• Space Elevator Ribbon Slipping, Buckling and Twisting.

ISDC 2025, Orlando, June 19-22 2025

• I presented some work on powering a space elevator using mechanical waves. My slides can be found here.

Space Exploration 2005, Albuquerque, NM, April 3-6 2005

• My notes from the conference
• I presented a paper on what happens if the space elevator breaks. You can download a preliminary version here, or get my slides from the conference (ppt) (sxi - OpenOffice) (pdf - no animations). The pictures I took are here.

Third Annual Space Elevator Conference, Washington, DC, June 28-30 2004

• My notes from the Conference, and the corresponding Slashdot story.
• Non-Equatorial Space Elevators, studying the basic equations in the case of uniform-stress tethers, presented at the third space elevator conference. My paper. My talk.
• Exponential Tethers for Accelerated Space Elevator Deployment. How you can build up a space elevator faster if you use exponentially tapered tethers and spooling buildup methods. This was presented at the third space elevator conference. My paper. My talk.
• The ISR website with all the presentations

Second Annual Space Elevator Conference, Santa-Fe, NM, September 12-15 2003

• My notes from the Conference
• My slides on the Linear Dynamics of the Space Elevator in the Absence of Climbers
• The ISR website with all the presentations

Papers

Many of the space elevator papers can be found online:

• Documents page at spaceelevator.com.
• Some of Jerome Pearson's papers.

Related links

• The ISR Space Elevator website for Dr Bradley Edwards' efforts
• The Liftport website for Michael Laine's efforts, it has a lively forum.
• The Yahoo Groups space-elevator mailing list.
• The Space Elevator webpage maintained by Marc Boucher
• An interesting page on the physics of the Space Elevator.
• Another webpage that monitors the Space Elevator's progess.
• The Gizmonics Space Elevator page. Lots of cool ideas are being developed here, with great attention to the details.
• Andy Price's Space Elevator blog.
• A page by Jim Cline that got me thinking about reel-to-reel buildup, and a local mirror of it.
• The Space Elevator Institute, run by Bruce Mackenzie.
• Roger G. Gilbertson has found the original Space Elevator paper by Artsutanov and had it translated into english.