New Scientist has a story on space elevators talking about the difficulty of passing through the van allen radiation belts. Story also has several links to other space elevator stories. here

Site Model Progress

So my first run was an unmitigated disaster, I tried hanging and just stringing cable which didn't really get enough tension. Tonight I'm going to try to place the boards on the ground and run an equal distance of cable between and then weight the bottom piece. The big strands in the photo are 1/16" aircraft cable which works out to about 3/32" to 1/8" in diameter in actuality.


I do, however have a ton of model parts to work with, so bring your super glue next week. I also have a bunch of extra, extremely small wire. I also just realized that fishing line may be the best , at this scale, the elevator cable wouldn't even be the width of a hair and would probably be invisible, fishing line may give us that effect.
I'll be trying again tonight, let me know if you have any ideas.