Question: can people build buildings to space

Stuart Archer answered on 25 Jun 2013:

With our current levels of technology, that would be pretty much impossible! The taller a building gets, the stronger it needs to be to resist things like strong winds and to hold up it’s own weight. If you were building something high enough to get it into space, it would have a lot of what are called ‘shear’ forces acting on it by the rotation of the earth – these are basically forces that act on the top of an object whilst the bottom is held in place. We would need incredibly strong and durable materials to build something that tall!

That being said, the idea of a ‘space elevator’ is something that’s been around in science fiction since the 1960’s, and there are people and organisations that are starting to give serious thought to how we might actually build one of these (look here for an example: http://www.spaceward.org/elevator-what ). With recent advances in materials such as ‘graphene’ and ‘carbon nanotubes’, it’s becoming more likely that we might be able to build something like this in the not too distant future!