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.

A space elevator could carry people, huge space-solar-power generators, or even casks of radioactive waste, at perhaps 100 times less energy than launching the Space Shuttle — at an estimated cost of just a trillion yen ($9.5 billion US).

According to Yoshio Aoki, a professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University and a director of the Japan Space Elevator Association, the cable would need to be about four times stronger than what is currently the strongest carbon nanotube fiber, or about 180 times stronger than steel.

“Riding silently into the sky, soon she was 100km high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X15s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, the point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight. Nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.”

From Firstborn by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter