David Bigelow pointed the way to build the Space Elevator on thermals – PC World

Sometimes a story just takes your breath away and this record 33,000 glider flight above a volcano is one. Carried in the Washington Post from a PC World article, the writer extrapolates this amazing glider flight using thermals from a volcano for the Space Elevator.

David Bigelow made this flight in 2008 using energy from Hawaii’s volcanoes to travel to an amazing 33,000 feet in a glider. The video has animation and actual footage of Bigelow making the journey.

The trip is spell binding. No engines – other than his tow plane – just the energy coming off the volcano at 600 feet per minute.

First, it dispels the myth that gliding is silent. The wind makes all kinds of noise. It is breathtaking though.

Watching that video I could not help but think that Bigelow was pointing the way for humanity to build its dreamed-of space elevator. With that much hot air rising from these volcanoes 365 days per year, you could haul a bunch of stuff up to 20,000 feet using, say, one hundred to two hundred specially designed wide-winged gliders.
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Using elevator lingo, let’s call that staging area for space flight the Second Floor. Keeping materials aloft at the Second Floor while a spacecraft is assembled would take real time, effort, energy, and expense. But ingenious ways could be devised to keep the Second Floor aloft, ranging from hot air balloons to helicopter blades powered by helicopter fuel, photovoltaics, or some other energy source.

What might that other energy source be? It could be water hauled up by the gliders. How could water keep the Second Floor aloft, you might wonder? In the center of the Second Floor ? its center of gravity ? would be a 3-foot-diameter tube that extends about a half mile back to Earth. Water falling through that tube would generate energy to help turn a large, slow-turning helicopter blade above the center of gravity of the Second Floor. For simplicity’s sake, this energy-harnessing mechanism could be mechanical (rather than mechanical/electrical), with the water falling down a screw-shape in the tube. In engineering terms, think of this as a reverse impeller PC World

Bigelow died in 2009 when he tried to take his record to 40,000 feet. Bigelow reached 38,700 feet before his glider crashed at 10,000 feet on the Mauna Loa volcano.

No official reasons were found for the crash; however, sail glider accidents are not uncommon.

TV news coverage of crash