The first members of the Elevator2010 Team, Ben Shelef (Spaceward Foundation and Elevator2010 CEO), Dave Carty (Launch Director) and Benjamin Bakhshi (Intern), have, after a long and grueling 20-hour drive from California, arrived onsite with a truck full of equipment. They report that things at the site “look good”.
The Kansas City Space Pirates have arrived in force. Team Captain Brian Turner has brought along his younger sister, his mother, his father, his stepfather, the neighbor’s kids, the neighbor’s kid’s mother, etc., 15 in all. They arrived in a convoy consisting of 3 trucks and 2 trailers and are now working on fine-tuning their Solar Concentrator mirror array, a truly impressive structure. They have twenty (count them, 20) mirrors; each sporting a dimension of 10 feet by 4 feet. These will be tuned to produce a spot that is only 3 feet in diameter. This will be further concentrated on the climber (by a factor of 30) by use of a parabolic trough. This beam will then be focused on water-cooled, high-power solar cells. In my opinion, it’s either going to run like a bat out of hell or burn their climber to a crisp 🙂 The photo shows some of the Space Pirate Mirror Arrays – Brian’s mom is in the background and, on the Elevator2010 website, you can see her hauling one of the mirrors around – click on the photo to view a larger version of it.
The German TurboCrawler team is in a bind, however. Their equipment has failed to clear customs in Los Angeles and, with them needing to set it up ASAP for their Qualification runs, they have a problem indeed. Dave Carty from the Elevator2010 team is working with them and with Customs to try and get this sorted out ASAP. Let’s wish our German friends luck, and, if you know someone at LA Customs, shoot off an email to Ben Shelef (ben AT spaceward.org).
Also, Ben reports that Creative Media Institute, who is documenting the competition, is also onsite and taking it all in.
More tomorrow !
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