Daily Archives: November 15, 2008

Stephen Steiner Guest Reporting from Japan

We have Stephen Steiner to thank for the following series of reports from the 1st Japanese Space Elevator Conference.  Since I am unable to attend this conference, Stephen has kindly consented to send us some reports from it.  Thanks Stephen!

Hello space elevator enthusiasts!  This is Stephen Steiner from the strong tether team DeltaX reporting live from the First Japan Space Elevator Conference in Tokyo.  Over the next three days I’ll be blogging from the conference for all of you who were unable to make it.  First I will cover the Japan Space Elevator Association Carbon Nanotube Filament Seminar, which will take place on Friday prior to the conference, followed by coverage of the conference itself, which will take place Saturday and Sunday.  Feel free to send questions along through Ted and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Introducing the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC)

“ISEC promotes the development, construction and operation of a space elevator as a revolutionary and efficient way to space for all humanity”

This is the mission statement of the newly formed International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), an organization created to encourage the growing international interest and momentum towards building a Space Elevator.  Several attendees at the recent Space Elevator Conference in Seattle talked about pooling their efforts to get such an effort underway and, after a false start or two, we’ve now succeeded in forming this Consortium.

We have incorporated as a non-profit corporation in the State of California and are now working on establishing our Federal 501c3 status (and for those of you who would like to point out how difficult this is, I’d just like to say that IRS Form 1023 and I are old friends 🙂 ).

Several groups have joined together in this effort; The Spaceward Foundation, The Japan Space Elevator Association, EuroSpaceward, The Space Elevator Reference and this Space Elevator Blog.  In addition to these groups, several other individuals (both long-timers in the Space Elevator community and newcomers from the Seattle conference) have joined this Consortium.

Yours truly has been chosen as the President of this organization; an honor which I find very humbling and exciting at the same time.  I have lots of plans to aggressively grow this organization and make no mistake about it; our goal is nothing less than to get a Space Elevator built.

You will be hearing much, much more about this organization in the near future so stay tuned.  In the meantime, I encourage you to head to the ISEC website and sign up for our newsletter so you can stay current with all of our efforts.