If you want to jump in on ground floor work to construct a space elevator, there are several pieces of new news.

Over at The Spaceward Foundation of Mountain View, California, they just got the word from NASA that the space agency’s Centennial Challenges program has increased its commitment to their space elevator competitions. They now have a total of $4 million in prize funds to disburse over the next 5 years - 10 times the purse they’ve had so far and out through 2010.

In order to bring operations to a level that matches the prize purse, the foundation is on the lookout for commercial sponsorships. Also, take a look at the group’s upcoming activities at this month’s X Prize Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico at:

http://www.space.com/news/060929_xprize_cup_elevator.html

In other space elevator progress, check out the 1.0 public beta version of a road map – a step-by-step guide to solving a myriad of lofty technical issues surrounding the elevated notion.

The road map has been created by the LiftPort Group in Bremerton, Washington. It can be found at:

http://www.liftport.com/papers/SE_Roadmap_v1beta.pdf

They speculate that the necessary material for establishing a space elevator will be available around 2020, making commercial operation of the first space elevator possible by the year 2031 – but that’s if there is adequate funding and no major developmental setbacks.

The LiftPort Group has also created a freely-available online resource containing space elevator-related research problems.

So if you’re hankering to develop your own elevator pitch, go to:

http://questions.liftport.com