Space Elevator Conferece - First Morning

August 13th, 2009

We’re all here and more or less awake.  Several sessions have already been completed.  I just finished listening to Karen Ghazaryan presenting on “Dynamics of a compound elastic cable for the Space Elevator“.  Karen came here all the way from Armenia to present his paper.  His paper sparked a lot of interest and a lot of questions - the most so far.

Now I’m listening to Ben Shelef present his paper “The Space Elevator Feasibility Condition“.  I’ve written before that I think this is one of the most important papers released in the Space Elevator field in the last year or two and anyone who wants to see how strong a tether has to be and how realistic a Space Elevator is needs to understand this document.  Ben’s pessimistic (but not totally gloomy) viewpoint is sure to spark a lot of questions afterwards too.

Good stuff so far today and I expect it to continue.

One note on the Strong Tether competition; there is only going to be one competitor this year, and yes, they have brought a carbon nanotube tether.  It’s a new team, from Japan, from Shizuoka University.  It will be very interesting to see what they have brought.  Unfortunately (very unfortunately) the MIT/DeltaX team which competed in the last Tether competition will not be here this year.  But we still will have a competition - the Japanese tether against the house tether.

Stay tuned!

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