ABSTRACT
Space exploration, beginning with suborbital space tourism, offers a promising new area of commercial activity. Generally speaking, a suborbital reusable launch vehicle (RLV) would not endure the same reentry hazards as an orbital RLV. The energy needed to be dissipated as heat on reentry of an orbital vehicle is significantly greater with fifty times more energy dissipated on the reentry of an orbital RLV than on a suborbital RLV. Nanotechnology provides the technological key to the space elevator. The ribbon would be made of light, but super strong, fibers woven from durable carbon nanotubes, built from tiny, molecular threads of carbon atoms, one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair in circumference and one-thousandth a hair's diameter in length. Beyond the technological hurdles, financial, legal, and security obstacles exist for the implementation of the space elevator. The political position of equatorial nations' 1976 Declaration of Bogota, may impact on the plans for the space elevator.
