David Appell, PhD and independent science journalist, has penned an article about the Space Elevator, partly based on his experience attending last year’s Space Elevator conference in Redmond.
At some point, it’s supposed to appear in the UK Magazine “Physics World” but you can read it now on his website. It’s a fairly comprehensive article.
And the relation to ice cream? Well, that’s in the article – supplemental reading here.
The first issue of ISEC’s Space Elevator Journal is now here! Volume 1 / Number 1 (publication date – December, 2011) is hot off the presses and will soon be sent out to all ISEC members (past and present) and Journal contributors.
The Journal consists of 8 peer-reviewed Papers plus some additional articles that I think our readers will enjoy. If I do say so myself, the content level of this Journal is quite high. We’re now working on making it available in ePub format and then will begin to plan for the next volume of the Journal.
As mentioned earlier, all members of ISEC will be receiving this Journal in the mail soon. If you are not a member of ISEC but want to purchase a copy, it will also soon be available on the ISEC website. But rather than buy it there, why not join ISEC instead? You will get a copy of the Journal mailed to you as part of your membership benefits and you will help us move this most magnificent engineering project forward.
(The photo thumbnails are of the Journal cover and an inside view of the photo of Yuri Artsutanov and the Foreword that he graciously wrote for our Journal. Click on either of them to see a full-size version.)
Update Feb 9, 2012 – You can now order this hard-copy publication at lulu.com.
Catching up on an older item here…
Over at the Space Elevator Reference, there was a post last November about a new product lab at Google, called Google X. The original story referred to is here.
And, it didn’t take long to find the naysayers… In the Times Science online edition of November 21st, columnist Jeffrey Kluger likens the Space Elevator to ‘…trickle-down economics’ – one of those ideas that ‘just won’t go away’. He lists a long litany of reasons why a Space Elevator ‘probably never will’ exist. He mentions the Coriolis effect, space debris, having to put the base station at sea, etc., etc., etc. and winds up estimating that the system will cost ‘$13.6 kazillion zillion’. Sigh.
Maybe I’ll send him a copy of the ISEC Journal (real soon now, promise!) and our report on Space Debris Mitigation…
Yes, I know, it’s been a long time since I put up a post – I just needed a break from blogging for a while.
But I’m back and ready to get you up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the Space Elevator community. Many exciting events are in the works including the imminent publishing of the first ISEC Journal, early planning on the 2012 Space Elevator Conference and much, much more.
In the meantime, please enjoy this holiday picture from Professor Pierre Rochus from the University of Liège in Belgium. You can click on the thumbnail to see a full-size version of the picture.
Happy Holidays!