[FPSPACE] Russian Professor Says NASA Stole Space Elevator Concept From Soviet Scientist

[Jim Oberg]

Jim Oberg comments: This story seems somewhat hysterical, and unintentionally a little ironic, 

in that "Yuri Kondratyuk" was an assumed name anyway (for good reasons, as I understand it).

But the real guy deserves real respect for his works, which included (I'm told) the first-ever

discussion of using lunar-orbit rendezvous for a human moon landing mission (I sure would like

to see any drawings he ever made showing this strategy, to include them in a place of honor in

my 'History of Orbital Rendezvous' binder -- but so far, nobody seems to know of any drawing).



Russian Professor Says NASA Stole Space Elevator Concept From Soviet Scientist

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/04/13/sibir.shtml

MosNews  -- Created: 13.04.2005 14:04 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 15:59 MSK 

    A Russian professor has accused the U-S of stealing ideas for a "space elevator" from a famous Russian engineer. Addressing a scientific conference in Khanty-Mansiisk, Novosibirk professor Yuri Vedernikov accused the U-S of stealing the ideas of the famous Russian engineer Yuri Kondratyuk. 

    Khanty-Mansiisk is currently the venue of an international conference on the latest achievements in geophysics and remote probing of the Earth held under the auspices of the Yugorsky Scientific Research Institute for Information Technologies. 

    Scientists Yuri Vedernikov and Yevgeny Nikolnikov of the Institute of Calculus Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics addressed the conference with a paper entitled "The space elevator by Yuri Kondratyuk for geostationary man-made satellites for natural resources studies." 

    In comments for Russian Information Agency Sibir, Vedernikov said that the idea of a space elevator was first proposed by Yuri Kondratyuk in the 1920s, but he intentionally omitted the chapter on the invention from his book "Exploration of Interplanetary Space", published in Novosibirsk in 1929, as he believed it was too early to make the project public as it could end up "in the hands of the untrustworthy, including the military". 

    Nonetheless, later Kondratyuk included the chapter in the so-called "final manuscript" printed in three copies. In 1938 the manuscript was lost. 

    According to some reports, Vedernikov claims, one of the copies of the final manuscript was obtained by the Soviet KGB, another could have fallen into the hands of NASA. The Novosibirsk professor believes that a copy could also have been handed over to German rocket scientist Werner von Braun who moved to the U.S. in 1945 where he soon became the chief ideologist of the U.S. space program. Vedernikov claimed that NASA used Kondratyuk's ideas to launch the project for building a "space elevator". 

    A space elevator, as Kondratyuk saw it, is a geostationary man-made satellite put into space by a rocket where it is positioned over the equator at a height of 30-95,000 kilometers. Then the satellite releases a thin cable along which an observing receiver slides up and down. The receiver is equipped with devices enabling it to monitor the environment, predict earthquakes, etc. 

    NASA announced its plans to build a space elevator several years ago. In 2002 U.S. scientists said they were working on turning a science fiction concept that first appeared in Arthur C. Clarke's book "The Fountains of Paradise" over 20 years ago. 

    NASA began considering the concept in June 1999 at the Advanced Space Infrastructure Workshop on "Geostationary Orbiting Tether 'Space Elevator' Concepts" held at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It brought together several dozen experts from NASA and private industry, G4TV.com Web-site reported. 

    In theory, the space elevator consists of a thin cable placed by the Space Shuttle into low Earth orbit (200 to 300 miles above Earth), and then raised to a stationary, geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles up. The cable is then lowered down to the Earth's surface and anchored to a mobile ocean-going platform in the Pacific Ocean along the equator, several thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador -- an area chosen for its lack of hurricanes and ship traffic.

    The cable is as thin as paper, but not as fragile. In fact, it has the same strength as diamonds, and consists of the same base element, carbon nanotubes. 

    The concept was first described in 1895 by Russian author K.E. Tsiolkovsky in his "Speculations about Earth and Sky and on Vesta."