The idea of traveling into space by an elevator originates
from Konstantin Tsiolkovski, who in 1895 proposed a freestanding
tower reaching from the surface of the Earth to
geostationary orbit. In 1959 another Russian scientist, Yuri
N. Artsutanov, suggested the use of a geostationary satellite as
the base for a long cable reaching down to the Earth’s surface.
By using a counterweight above the geostationary orbit, the
whole system could stand freely in force equilibrium.1
The space elevator probably became most famous when
Arthur C. Clarke published his novel The Fountains of Paradise
(1979). But at that time there was no material that could
withstand the enormous tensile stress in a cable tens of thousands
of kilometers long. In 1991 carbon nanotubes were first
identified in an electron microscope image by Japanese Sumio
Iijima.2 Strong chemical bonds between carbon atoms and its
small mass made carbon nanotubes a promising material for
the construction of a space elevator cable.