Friday, November 18, 2005
Yuri Artsutanov and His 1960 Space Elevator Proposal in Pravda
In 2003, after reading about Dr. Brad Edwards' NASA funded study, I became curious of about the origins of the idea. I'd read mentions of Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov and his 1960 article in Pravda, but could not locate the original story. (Oh, what easy access to information we've come to expect thanks to the Internet!)
Eventually I learned that Stanford University's Hoover Institution has a complete Pravda collection on microfilm. I contacted them and found a librarian, Ms. Molloy, eager to help. After a brief search, she sent me prints of the page.
Using a free demonstration version of a Cyrillic OCR (optical character recognition) program called FineReader 5 Pro from Abbyy Software, I scanned and converted the article into a Macintosh document using a Cyrillic font. As I do not read Russian, proofreading took a while, checking the software's output against the grainy microfilm print, letter by letter (“double K, upside-down L, backwards R...”).
Finally, I sent the Russian text to my cousin-in-law, Joan, who is a Russian scholar at Catholic University in Washington, DC. She did the bulk of the translation into English, and I helped with choosing an occasional technical term. I then laid out both Russian and English versions that duplicated the original format, added the original artwork from the page, and made PDF files of both versions.
Finally, I passed the PDF files out to four or five Space Elevator web sites, and from there it has spread to quite a few places. I wanted to make the source material available in an easy to use form, and it has been enjoyable to watch the file find its way around the internet.
I still do not know if the original story appeared in color or only black and white. I have learned that Mr. Artsutanov still lives in Russia and actively promotes the space elevator concept. Hopefully the space elevator community can arrange for him to speak at an upcoming SE conference. It would be great to get him and Arthur C. Clarke into the same room, at least via video conference!
In addition to the space elevator competition mentioned, the field right now has plenty of room for the contributions of amateur scientists.
One of the biggest opportunities might be in exploring ways to make tiny carbon nanotubes (CNT) into macroscopic fibers having higher strength to weight ratios than any other material.
Take a piece of regular knitting yarn, unravel it a bit and tease out individual fibers. Each one measures just a few centimeters long, and yet when “spun” they hold together without knotting or adhesives. (How often we overlook the amazing features of old technologies.) How might we find ways of doing the same with microscopic CNT fibers?
Might an amateur investigator discover the secrets of spinning CNT into macroscopic strands? Or might someone coax spiders or silkworms to incorporate CNT into their thread-making and have them create fibers with unheard of strength?
Obviously, even before it gets built, the space elevator field promises a lot of excitement.
First published here in The Citizen Scientist.
Yuri Artsutanov of the Leningrad Technological Institute proposed a space elevator concept 45 years ago in “To the Cosmos by Electric Train” (Young Persons’ Pravda, 31 July 1960). An English translation of this remarkable article (PDF) has been placed on the web by Joan Barth Urban and robotics expert and author Roger G. Gilbertson. Here Roger explains how this translation was arranged.
I read with interest the editorial on recent action in the space elevator field (“Citizen Scientists and the Space Elevator: Going Up?” The Citizen Scientist, 4 November 2005). Like many, I first learned of the concept in “Fountains of Paradise” by Arthur C. Clarke.
