Daily Archives: August 11, 2010

Results from Japan’s 2010 JSETEC Competition

The Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) held its 2nd annual Japan Space Elevator Technical & Engineering Competition this past weekend.  I received this email from Shuichi Ohno, president of JSEA:

We finished our JSETEC competition 2 days ago.
15 teams bring 16 climbers.
Each team tried 1-3 times.

Champion is Kanagawa University team. (Speed was not high, but safety sureness and functional point was high.)

Top players like Munich team could not complete their climb and (with) decent safety.

All of JSETEC acting team members are too much tired from 3 days competition.

Saskatchewan team’s rope tether climber marks 18.3m/s (=66km/h!) We have not checked, just from their log data, but we watched crazy climb speed before it broke and crashed on the ground.

We are now making English press release. (To be distributed)

Some news:
– We have a plan to hold climb meeting once for 3 – 4 month.(30-300m eight)  to enhance the climber technology. (cost $200 – $300 for each team)
– Andreas of Munich expressed their new SE competition plan in German from 2011.

Some press coverage:

Yahoo News UK

Telegraph

(Source movie of JSETEC was distributed by Reuter. We are now checking why Reuter TV crew didn’t indicate credit on the movie…)

Thanks
Shuichi Ohno
Chairman JSEA

18.3meters/second! Yes, it’s a battery-powered climb, but still, that is very impressive.  It’s nice to see that the team from USST is keeping their hand in the game (I assume it’s the same group – I’ll have to check).

I also have just received the Press release from Kayoko Oshima which you can find here.  It gives the complete results from the competition.

Finally, Ben Shelef, CEO of the Spaceward Foundation, found a video summary of the competition.  You can see it here. Note that this page is an aggregation of news stories.  At the moment, this story is the topmost, leftmost one.  I don’t know how long it will stay up on this site or it’s future location among other stories.  So, the sooner you try and watch it, the better chance you’ll have.

The video summary is very good, and it’s very impressive that they put this together and aired it just a couple of days after the competition.

Congratulations to Shuichi Ohno and the Japan Space Elevator Association for putting on another great competition.  And congratulations to all of the competitors, especially the winners from Kanagawa University, for their fine showing.

Strong Tether challenge just 3 days away…

The Strong Tether challenge, part of the Space Elevator Games, is just three days away!  It will be held at the upcoming Space Elevator Conference, on Friday, August 13th.

This challenge is part of the NASA Centennial Challenge program and is administered by the Spaceward Foundation.  Oh, and by the way, NASA has provided a $2 Million dollar prize purse for this competition, just like they have for the Climber / Power-Beaming competition.

This year it looks like we may may have multiple entries – the first time that’s happened in a few years.  But we’re only going to know for sure at the competition.

For up-to-the-minute information and status, subscribe to our Twitter Feed “SEGames”.  And, if all works according to plan, we’ll be broadcasting the competition live over the Internet via uStream.  Details will be posted here and on Twitter.

I know that the Climber / Power-Beaming Challenge is the ‘sexier’ of the Space Elevator Games, but IMHO, the Strong Tether Challenge is the more important one.  No one in the know seriously doubts the ability to beam power over distance and then do something useful with it (though the devil is always in the details and I’m certainly not saying it is easy – look how long it took a team to actually win some prize money in this challenge), but creating a fundamentally stronger material is more than an exercise in ‘simple’ Engineering – it requires a real scientific breakthrough – and this breakthrough is required if we’re going to build an earth-based Space elevator someday.

If someone can win the challenge this year at the Space Elevator Conference, the year that Yuri Artsutanov and Jerome Pearson attend, well then I think it will be safe to say that Gods want a Space Elevator to be built.

Stay tuned!