A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space.

The idea of a space elevator  passengers and cargo traveling up and down a 60,000-mile cable  has long been a fixture of science fiction, notably in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The Fountains of Paradise.”

A real space elevator is still decades in the future, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with the nonprofit organization Spaceward Foundation, sponsored the contest to encourage development of some of the needed technologies.

“It’s a way to get work done in an interesting area that probably wouldn’t be done otherwise,” said Andrew Petro, manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.