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!