Tomorrow should be a fun day.  If all goes well, we’ll see our first climbs on the helicopter-hoisted cable.  The climbers will be powered by batteries, not lasers, but this should still be cool nonetheless.

Also, if all goes well, we’ll be live-streaming this out to everyone to see.  You have two options to view this.  You can go to www.ustream.tv/segames – that should take you to the live, streaming website.  Also, you can go to the official site of the Space Elevator Games, www.spaceelevatorgames.org, and click on the Live Coverage tab at the top.  This should take you to a page where you will see both the streaming video and a Twitter Feed to let you know what’s going on.

Stay tuned!

Our base of operations here at Dryden is Hanger 4823.  It’s an adjunct to a machine shop, a very cool, professional and accomodating machine shop I might add.  They’ve already turned out several parts for us on a moments notice.

When we here for Round 1 of testing, conditions were a bit more primitive then they are today.  There are bathrooms and water was available but Internet access was almost impossible unless you were lucky enough to have Verizon wireless data service (like I do).  For the testing this week, they have set up several tables; each with power and wired Internet access.  Lots of bottled water and Gatorade.  It’s all very civilized…

One of the new things added for this round is a Televison monitor.  We’ve seen CNN and the Weather Channel on it and today, they switched to Base Camera 8.  This monitors activity out on the lakebed.  We are now able to monitor the activities out at the lakebed testing location.  The picture isn’t all that clear (long distance, heat waves diffusing up from the desert floor and I think they are just retransmitting something they sent to uStream – add that all up and you lose some detail), but it’s very cool nonetheless.

And, a little while ago, I had a visit from the Geeky squad (aka the KCSP team).  They have purchased these ‘cool’ hats, complete with white LEDs.  Geekiness lives…

(I want one)

(Click on any of the picture thumbnails to see a larger version of the picture)

The surprise entry in these Games, at least IMHO, is the team from the Universityof Alberta (UASERT).  This is partly my fault; there are team chats every Sunday which I used to attend.  However I haven’t recently, but the UASERT has.

They and their equipment arrived yesterday and they are now in the Hanger with the rest of us, assembling their entry.  I’ve taken a couple of photos and included them in this post.

The first two pictures are of the bottom side of their solar array, one shot looking downward on the array while the other shot is looking edge-on to the array.

The third picture is of the steel box which holds their optics.  Hmmm, steel, painted black, sitting out in the Mojave desert sun for several hours.  I hope they brought asbestos gloves…

They’re still assembling their system and hope to get out to the lakebed tomorrow for laser testing.

One other note about this team; if you visit their website, you can read both their blog (which is very interesting and gives the reader a good view of the team’s activities as it scrambled to get ready for this competition) and a number of photos.  Good stuff…

(Click on any picture thumbnail to see a larger version)

As noted on the official website of the Space Elevator Games, we’re now down to four teams; the Kansas City Space Pirates, LaserMotive, USST and the University of Alberta.  KCSP, LaserMotive and USST have all met all hurdles and are in.  The Alberta team has to convince both Spaceward and NASA that they are ready to go…