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【单选题】From cyborg housemaids and water-powered cars to dog translators, and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality. Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.
For chemists, physicists, material scientists, astronauts and dreamers across the globe, the space elevator represents the most tantalizing of concepts: cables stronger and lighter than any fibre yet woven, tethered to the ground and disappearing beyond the atmosphere to a satellite docking station in geosynchronous orbit aboveEarth.
Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables-or flat ribbons-will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.
In the carriages, the scientists behind the idea told The Times , could be any number of cargoes.A、space elevator could carry people, huge solar-powered generators or even casks of radioactive waste. The point is that breaking free ofEarth-s gravity will no longer require so much energy- perhaps 100 times less than launching the space shuttle. "Just like traveling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space," Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan SpaceElevatorAssociation, said
The vision has inspired scientists around the world and government organizations, including NasA、Several competing space elevator projects are gathering pace as various groups vie to build practical carriages, tethers and the hundreds of other parts required to carry out the plan. There are prizes offered by space elevator-related scientific organizations for breakthroughs and competitions for the best and fastest design of carriage.
First envisioned by the celebrated master of science fiction,ArthurC、Clarke, in his 1979 work The Fountains o f Paradise, the concept has all the best qualities of great science fiction: it is bold, it is a leap of imagination and it would change life as we know it. Unlike the warp drives in Star Trek, or H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the idea of the space elevator does not mess with the laws of science; it just presents a series of very, very complex engineering problems.
Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (￡5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.
The biggest obstacle lies in the cables. To extend the elevator to a stationary satellite from theEarth’s surface world require twice that length of cable to reach a counterweight, ensuring that the cable maintains its tension. The cable must be exceptionally light, staggeringly strong and able to withstand all projectiles thrown at it inside and outside the atmosphere. The answer, according to the groups working on designs, will lie in carbon nanotubes-microscopic particles that can be formed into fibres and whose mass production is now a focus of Japan’s big textile companies.
According to YoshioAoki, a professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University and a director of the Japan SpaceElevatorAssociation, the cable would need to be about four times stronger than what is currently the strongest carbon nanotube fibre, or about 180 times stronger than steel. Pioneering work on carbon nanotubes inCambridge has produced a strength improvement of about 100 times over the past five years.
Equally, there is the issue of poweri
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