NEAL STEPHENSON has a big idea. He imagines a 20-kilometre-high steel tower that reaches into the stratosphere. From that height, weather patterns would be distant swirls. Planes could save fuel by docking at the tower rather than landing, and space missions could do the same by launching from it.
A science-fiction novelist, Stephenson is not just using his idea as the basis for a story. The author of the critically acclaimed Snow Crash is taking the unusual step of teaming up with a structural engineer, Keith Hjelmstad at Arizona State University (ASU) in Phoenix, to work out how to…
