2011 Space Elevator Games – Strong Tether Competition – is Friday

undefinedOn Friday, August 12th, the next installment of the Strong Tether Competition of the Space Elevator Games, one of the NASA Centennial Challenges, will take place.  It will be held on the first day of the Space Elevator Conference and is part of the ISEC theme this year of “Longer, stronger tethers – 30MYuri or bust!”

It looks like we have a couple of competitors this year and we are all hopeful that they can raise the bar on tether strength and help point the way to a material strong enough to build a Space Elevator.

Like last year, the competition will be live video-streamed for your viewing pleasure.  The URL for the livestream is here, and the competition is scheduled to begin at 4:00pm, US Pacific time.  If you are unable to follow the competition live, I will be Tweeting the activities as they occur.

And today, on a related note, several of us visited Puget Sound Rope, one of the Cortland Cable companies.  They are located in Anacortes, about an hour and a half north of Redmond.  We had an absolutely fascinating tour of their factory and I took lots of pictures and videos – I will post these in the next few days.  But I wanted to share a YouTube video with you that they gave me the link to.  This video is a compressed version of a test-to-failure of a big, big rope.  The machine that does this testing is truly industrial strength – and it’s our hope that a machine like this will be needed some day to test a space elevator tether.

Enjoy – and stay tuned to Friday’s competition!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcDs2feka0Q[/youtube]