After the development of carbon nanotubes in the 1990s, engineer David Smitherman of NASA/Marshall's Advanced Projects Office realized that the high strength of these materials might make the concept of an orbital skyhook feasible, and put together a workshop at the Marshall Space Flight Center, inviting many scientists and engineers to discuss concepts and compile plans for an elevator to turning the concept into a reality. The publication he edited compiling information from the workshop, "Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium", provides an introduction to the state of the technology at the time, and summarizes the findings.
Another American scientist, Bradley C. Edwards, suggested creating a 100,000 km long paper-thin ribbon using nanotube fibers, suggesting that this structure would stand a greater chance of surviving impacts by meteoroids. Supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, the work of Edwards was expanded to cover the deployment scenario, climber design, power delivery system, orbital debris avoidance, anchor system, surviving atomic oxygen, avoiding lightning and hurricanes by locating the anchor in the western equatorial Pacific, construction costs, construction schedule, and environmental hazards. The largest holdup to Edwards' proposed design is the technological limits of the tether material. His calculations call for a fiber composed of epoxy-bonded carbon nanotubes with a minimal tensile strength of 130 GPa (including a safety factor of 2); however, tests in 2000 of individual single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), which should be notably stronger than an epoxy-bonded rope, indicated the strongest measured as 52 GPa. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes have been measured with tensile strengths up to 63 GPa.
In order to speed development of space elevators, proponents are planning several competitions, similar to the Ansari X Prize, for relevant technologies. Among them are Elevator:2010 which will organize annual competitions for climbers, ribbons and power-beaming systems, the Robolympics Space Elevator Ribbon Climbing competition, as well as NASA's Centennial Challenges program which, in March 2005, announced a partnership with the Spaceward Foundation (the operator of Elevator:2010), raising the total value of prizes to US$400,000.
In 2005, "the LiftPort Group of space elevator companies has announced that it will be building a carbon nanotube manufacturing plant in Millville, New Jersey, to supply various glass, plastic and metal companies with these strong materials. Although LiftPort hopes to eventually use carbon nanotubes in the construction of a 100,000 km (62,000 mile) space elevator, this move will allow it to make money in the short term and conduct research and development into new production methods. "The group also announced that they had obtained permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to use airspace to conduct preliminary tests of its high altitude robotic lifters. The experiment was successful.
On February 13, 2006 the LiftPort Group announced that, earlier the same month, they had tested a mile of "space-elevator tether" made of carbon-fiber composite strings and fiberglass tape measuring 5 cm wide and 1 mm (approx. 6 sheets of paper) thick, lifted with balloons.
On August 24, 2006 the Japanese National Museum of Emerging Science and Technology in Tokyo has started to show the animation movie 'Space Elevator', based on ATA Space Elevator Project, also directed and edited by project leader, Dr. Serkan Anilir. This movie shows a possible image about the cities of future, placing the space elevator tower as a new infrastructure into the city planning, and aims to contribute children education. Currently, the movie is shown in all science museums in Japan.
The x-Tech Projects company has also been founded to pursue the prospect of a commercial Space Elevator.
In 2007, Elevator:2010 held the 2007 Space Elevator games which featured US$500,000 awards for each of the two competitions, (US$1,000,000 total) as well as an additional US$4,000,000 to be awarded over the next five years for space elevator related technologies. No teams won the competition, but a team from MIT entered the first 2-gram, 100% carbon nanotube entry into the competition.