The Strong Tether Challenge is scheduled to occur on August 13th 2010 at the Space Elevator Conference.

You can follow the games at http://www.SpaceElevatorGames.org

Competition Date: August 13, 2010

Latest Competition Handbook (v1.0) and Team Agreement (v1.0)

To start the registration process, please us.

Welcome to Elevator:2010's annual climber competition.

The single most difficult task in building the Space Elevator is achieving the required tether strength-to-weight ratio -- in other words, developing a material that is both strong enough and light enough to support the 60,000 mile long tether.

Compared to the best commercially available tether, we need a material that is almost 25 times better - about as great a leap as from wood to metal. Quite a tall order!

Luckily for us, about 15 years ago a new material was discovered, one that has the potential of fulfilling these seemingly impossible requirements. The material, Carbon Nanotubes, is only now becoming available from laboratories in its raw form in sufficient quantities.

The task ahead is to weave these raw CNTs into a useful form - a space worthy long tether.

The following chart illustrates quite well how far it is we have to go... We plot the competition results, as well as product spec sheets and published results against a hypothetical 50% yearly improvement curve. Can material strength match this curve? Will progress be steady and linear or will it be characterized by large improvements followed by years of no progress? Time will tell.

In order to encourage CNT laboratories to place greater emphasis on the tensile strength properties of CNTs, we have posted an open dare to industry and academia: We will award up to $2M (in four prize levels), provided by NASA, to the teams that can come up with the best Space Elevator tether sample, provided that they meet the benchmarks shown in the table above.

The rules are simple. The task is not.

Update:

We have had two CNT competitors to date, both showing samples that were "fresh out of the furnace", and neither performing even close the the benchmarks we've set.

Some of the difficulty was that in research quantities, a 2 gram sample such as we requested represents a lot of material. We're thereofre allowing shorter samples starting this year.