Daily Archives: May 30, 2008

ISDC2008 – Day 2 – Part 3

Here are a few more photos taken at today’s ISDC2008 conference.

This first one is of a young lady walking around ISDC2008 in a concept design for a new-style spacesuit.  It is supposed to be much more flexible and efficient then ones being used today.  She told me the name of the company was “StarSuits”, but that they don’t yet have a website.  You heard it here first…

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This second picture is of (from left to right) Ben Shelef, Brian Turner and Ray Dittmeier.  Ray is the author of the Space Prizes Blog, a blog dedicated to all things Space Prizes related.  He and I have emailed each other a few times in the past and he has always had nice things to say about my blog so it was a real (and unexpected!) pleasure to meet him today.  His blog is very succinct and is the place to go if you want to follow events in all of the various Space Prize competitions being held.

The National Space Society (NSS) Climber team is selling raffle tickets for a Quilt.  I’m told that this is not just any quilt, but one that normally sells for thousands and thousands of dollars.  This picture is a closeup of the tickets.  Well, I thought they were interesting…

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Finally, this photo shows the shipping box for the Meteor Crater exhibit.  It’s laying on its side and, sizewise, is quite impressive.  My guess is about 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide and 4 feet deep.  I’m sure the shipping company was thrilled when they saw this…  It looks very sturdy and should keep this exhibit well protected.

Tomorrow, we finally get to the two Space Elevator presentations which are scheduled.  The first is by Jim Dempsey, an entrepreneur who has come up with an alternative way of deploying a Space Elevator tether.  The second presentation will be by Bert Murray of the NSS team, giving us a status report of his team’s climber.  He’s also promised to bring the “proof of concept” model used in the BBC footage I blogged about last month.

Stay tuned…

(Click on the thumbnails for a larger version of the picture)

ISDC2008 – Day 2 – Part 2

How many engineers does it take to replace a balloon?  The video, below, explores this complicated issue…

It seems that the balloon used in the Space Elevator Games venue mockup was leaking and losing some of it’s lift, so it had to be replaced.  In this video, we see Ben Shelef, founder of Spaceward and the creator of this exhibit doing just that.  First he had to untie one of the four tethers so that he could pull the ‘current’ balloon over close enough to him so he could work with it.  Then we see him replace the balloon with the new one and then have it returned to its original position.  He was ably assisted by Brian Turner and Ravi of the Kansas City Space Pirates.

All in all, a competent job 🙂

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrOlT9cGJ50[/youtube]

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Some things I learned (or relearned) about balloons and tethers today:

This balloon is filled with Helium, a monatomic (single atom) molecule.  This means that it will leak more than a balloon filed with Hydrogen, a diatomic (two-atom) molecule.  I may have learned this in High School, but probably not…

You’ll note that there are four tethers holding up the balloon.  Four was used, rather than three, for a very specific reason.  If you have four tethers and one of them snaps, this will not put any additional force on the tether/rope in the middle, the one being used for the racetrack.  However, if you have only three tethers and one of them snaps, then additional force can be put on the ‘racetrack’ tether, possibly causing it to snap.  And if a climber happens to be on it at the time, well, look out below…

ISDC2008 – Day 2 – Part 1

It’s now the second day of the ISDC2008 conference.  As I blogged yesterday, Stephen Steiner of team DeltaX was at the conference and at the Spaceward exhibit; demonstrating and talking about carbon nanotubes.

Today, we have the team captains from three of the Climber / Power-Beaming teams in attendance, Bert Murray (of the NSS team), David Nemir (of the TXL Group team) and Brian Turner (of the Kansas City Space Pirates).  I’ve taken several photos and shot a few videos.  I’m posting some now and more later.

Here is a picture of Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation and David Nemir, captain of the TXL Group team.  Ben is the guy with pointer.

David tells me that there will be some ‘very interesting’ news about their Climber system that they will be releasing soon.

This is a picture of Ben with Bert Murray, team captain for the National Space Society (NSS) team.

Bert’s team also has an booth in the Exhibition Hall and he will be giving a presentation at the conference tomorrow.

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And here is a picture of Brian Turner, captain of the Kansas City Space Pirates, and recent guest on the Conan O’Brien show…

Why is Brian always in a hard hat and always trying to fix a problem? 🙂

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Also in attendance from the Kansas City Space Pirates was Ravi.  He’s a main character in the “Fix the Balloon” video which I’ll be posting later.

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This is a picture of the three team captains.  I’m not sure what they’re discussing, but I’m sure it’s being done without revealing a lot of information…

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Finally, an old friend, Ken Davidian, the previous Centennial Challenges guy from NASA, is here.  This photo show him talking with Brian Turner.

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More later…

(As always, click on the thumbnails for a larger version of the picture)