Presentations for today, including one by yours truly, have finished.  After I finish putting up this post, time to go downstairs and have a beer or two…

My presentation went well (I think).  No one laughed (at least none that I could hear) and no one threw anything at me.  I also was asked several questions and have had two other conference participants stop me in the hall and tell me that they enjoyed my presentation.  So I guess it went OK.  Huge thanks to Marco Benassi, my speech teacher…

The picture is of Brad Edwards (on the right) and Haym Benaroya.  Haym, from Rutgers University, gave a couple of presentations today; “Lunar Base Concepts” and “Why the moon?”.  Brad makes his two presentations tomorrow.  I’m hoping that we hear something (anything) about Black Line Ascension, his new venture with Bryan Laubscher.

As always, click on the thumbnail for a larger version.

Today was the first “real” day of this year’s 2007 SESI conference.  Yesterday evening, there were some talks given to the public about astronomy, and all that was cool, but today is when we start getting into the scientific presentations…

Bryan Laubscher, one of the driving forces in the Space Elevator “movement” gave one of the keynote addresses this morning.  He brought the audience (most are not here for the Space Elevator portion of this conference, rather for “The Second International Conference and Exposition on Science, Engineering, and Habitation in Space”) up to speed on the current concept of the Space Elevator, the “Brad Edwards version”.  This will be one of only two Space Elevator related presentations made today (lots more are made tomorrow).

My presentation; “Who will build the first, earth-based Space Elevator?” is scheduled for this afternoon.  I was glad to see that nothing Bryan said in his presentation this morning contradicted anything I’ve written 🙂

Also attending the conference is Patrick Boake, of the Space Elevator Journal.  He’s the “official press guy” for this event.  Here is a picture of him trying to combine relaxation and work…

Much more on this conference over the next 2&1/2 days.

Click on the thumbnails for larger versions of the pictures.