Daily Archives: January 25, 2007

USST shows off their Climber at Spectrum 2007

Over this past weekend, Clayton Ruszkowski and the USST team demonstrated their climber at Spectrum 2007; “Robots, handmade cars and an elevator to space are all part of Spectrum 2007 being put on by the University of Saskatchewan’s college of engineering.  The four-day show gives both engineering students and local companies a chance to display innovative ideas and designs.”

This climber is, of course, the one that turned in the best times at both the 2005 and 2006 Space Elevator Games and just missed being awarded the NASA prize money last year.

Clayton kindly emailed me tonight to let me know that a couple of videos taken at the event demonstrating their lifter are now posted on YouTube.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjaZFq7raaQ[/youtube]
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q4nseq9W1s[/youtube]
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January 19th article in the Star Phoenix.

January 16th article in Saskatoon Home Page.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, was that an elevator car? Industry leader Otis calls NASA elevator to orbit feasible

In the interview with Dr. Bryan Laubscher on The Space Show last tuesday, Dr. Livingston somewhat jokingly talked with Dr. Laubscher about an “Otis” Space Elevator.

This reminds me of this story from Space.com where John Thackrah, vice-president of Engineering for Otis said; “Today we have the technology to create elevator systems for a five-mile-high tower… At the rate of our development efforts we could apply technology we are working on for today’s existing market to the NASA concept within the next 10 years.”

Also, I want to point my readers to a concept picture of an Otis Space Elevator posted on Flickr last October…