A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan in November, and hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the only lift that will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.

Japan is hosting an international conference in November to draw up a timetable for a space-elevator machine to power carriages that climb 22,000 miles into space on a carbon nanotube fiber.

If an elevator stretching from Earth into space could ever be built, it could slash the cost of space travel. But a controversial new study suggests that building and maintaining one would be an even bigger challenge than previously thought, because it would need to include built-in thrusters to stabilise itself against dangerous vibrations.

A new study warns that humans might not survive travel on a space elevator thanks to the whopping dose of ionising radiation they would receive travelling through the core of the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth. These are two concentric rings of charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic fields.

A radically different way to reach outer space -- the space elevator -- may finally be getting off the ground floor thanks to recent huge advances in technology.

NASA is sponsoring a competition to develop the technology needed for a space elevator.

A company that someday hopes to build the first space elevator says it is testing a system that could take it to a lower-altitude goal along the way: balloon-based wireless data services.

Is it possible to make a cable for a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes? Not anytime soon, if ever, says Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy. Pugno's calculations show that inevitable defects in the nanotubes mean that such a cable simply wouldn't be strong enough.

A private US company has passed a new milestone towards building a space elevator by building a cable that stretches a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line.

In the space-technology race, NASA is welcoming some dark horse candidates. The space agency's prize competitions inspire enthusiastic entrants from around the U.S.—most recently in a contest to design an elevator from Earth to space.