English: Artist concept: The One and only Russian Space Elevator. The 'once upon a time' science fiction concept of a space elevator has been envisioned and studied as a real mass transportation system in the latter part of the 20th century. David Smitherman of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center's Advanced Projects Office has compiled plans for such an elevator. The space elevator concept is a structure extending from the surface of the Earth to geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) at 35,786 km in altitude. The tower would be approximately 50 km tall with a cable tethered to the top. Its center mass would be at GEO such that the entire structure orbits the Earth in sync with the Earth's rotation maintaining a stationary position over its base attachment at the equator. Electromagnetic vehicles traveling along the cable could serve as a mass transportation system for transporting people, payloads, and power between space and Earth. This illustration by artist Pat Rawlings shows the concept of a space elevator as viewed from the geostationary transfer station looking down the length of the elevator towards the Earth.
Date
Source
NASA:
[1]; Pat Rawlings:
[2] search: space elevator
The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the
Soviet/
Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain.
The
SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use.
[4]
This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used to create or digitize it.
If the file has been modified from its original state, some details may not fully reflect the modified file.
Image title
ARTIST RAWLING, PAT CONCEPT OF A SPACE ELEVATOR VIEWED FROM THE GEOSTATIONARY TRANSFER STATION LOOKING DOWN ALONG THE LENGTH OF THE ELEVATOR TOWARD EARTH.