Yuri N. Artsutanov (1929-) is an engineer from Leningrad who, in his 1960 article "V Kosmos na Electrovoze (Into space with the help of an electric locomotive)" (Komsomolskaya, July 31, 1960) [presumably 'Komsomol'skaia Pravda', seeing as otherwise it's a free-floating adjective - I'll dig it out of the basement at St. Antony's if I ever get time -- MF] first proposed the idea of a Space Elevator, or 'heavenly funicular', as he called it. A remastered and translated version of the paper is online:
Artsutanov got the idea for the Space Elevator from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1895 proposed an 'orbital tower', which did exactly what it said on the tin. The crucial difference between the tower and the elevator is that the tower is a compression structure, whereas the elevator is an orbiting tension structure; the former is essentially not possible to build, whereas the latter is possible, albeit challenging. Although that's not what <http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Engineering/Landis-GA/TTTR.html> says, so now i'm puzzled. In fact, that paper says that the best solution is to build a tower up to 3000 km.
Naturally, Yuri is mates with Arthur C Clarke.
| Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:50:37 GMT | Front Page | Recent Changes | Message Of The Day |