Space Elevator Blog celebrates 1 year anniversary

All together now;

Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear Space Elevator Blog!
Happy birthday to you! 

Yes, I know it’s April Fools day, but this is no joke – one year ago today, I started this blog.  It’s been a fun year.  Highlights include;

  • Attending the 2nd Annual Space Elevator Games where I was fortunate to be selected as the “Official Blogger”.  I guess I did an OK job because I’ve been selected to be the “Official Blogger” for this year’s Games, too.  One of the best things about being at these Games was interacting with the leaders and members of the various teams that had entered.  They are a real “can-do” group and were a lot of fun to be around.
  • Attending the SESI2007 Conference where I gave a presentation; “Who will build the first, earth-based Space Elevator”.  Also at this conference, I was able to spend time with most of the “hard-core” Space Elevator junkies – always an “uplifting” (pun intended) experience…
  • Meeting such luminaries in the field such as Brad Edwards, Bryan Laubscher, Ben Shelef, Michael Laine and Tom Nugent – people who have been involved in this project for a lot longer than I have.
  • Understanding, to a much greater degree than before, how a Space Elevator really is going to work and being able to intelligently (at least I hope it’s intelligently) think about problems and alternatives.  At the recently concluded SESI2007 Conference, Bryan Laubscher gave a talk on the basics of what the current model of a Space Elevator is and how/why it would work.  I understand things well enough now that I could have given his talk (though I would have punted had someone in the audience asked me some arcane, technical question about ribbon harmonics or something similar – being able to understand that is next year’s project 🙂 ).
  • Watching the traffic at this site steadily grow.  I don’t know exactly how many visitors I’ve had since the site has started because a) I didn’t keep statistics for the first couple of months and b) Sitemeter (my stat-counter) has occasionally just “died” and consequently lost count of some of the visitors.  But in the first year, I’ve had well over 28,000 visitors – and that’s a number I’m pretty happy with.  Traffic peaked during the Space Elevator Games; on October 23rd of last year, this site had 1,966 visitors and well over 4,000 page views.  For the 7-day period of October 18th through October 24th, this site had 10,308 visitors – people wanted to hear about the Space Elevator Games and I (to the best of my knowledge) was the only one doing real-time reporting from the event.  Having people mention this site, such as David Livingston on his Space Show and Mat Kaplan on The Planetary Society’s Radio show has helped immensely.  I think my continually posting fresh material has helped, too – no one likes visiting a site that hasn’t been updated regularly.  This posting will be my 579th on this blog.
  • Being able to join one of the four teams that were created at the recently concluded SESI2007 Conference.  As I reported earlier, these teams have been set up to further the vision of a Space Elevator.  The team I’ve joined, the “technology” team, is headed up by Brad Edwards.  Working with someone with his knowledge and vision is going to be very exciting – I just hope I can keep up…

So, what will the next year bring?  Who knows?  We’re all waiting for the breakthrough in carbon nanotube research that will allow a Space Elevator to be built.  If/when that happens, this whole idea will instantly change from an “interesting intellectual exercise” to a real project.  I have every intention of being involved in any way I can.

In the meantime, I’ll watch and report everything I can find which is Space-Elevator related and I will do whatever I can to further this project along.  In addition to working with Brad Edward’s technology team, I’m planning on attending and live-blogging this year’s Space Elevator Games and will make every effort to attend the inagural EuroSpaceward version of the Games in 2008.

Stay tuned!

7 thoughts on “Space Elevator Blog celebrates 1 year anniversary

  1. Darnell Clayton

    Happy Birthday SEB! (space elevator blog!)

    Congrats Ted for blogging this long! How does it feel surviving one of the biggest blog hurdles as a blogger?

  2. Ted Semon Post author

    Thanks, Darnell, for the kind words.

    Biggest Blog Hurdles – making it for one year? If that’s what you mean, then it feels great!

    And a very belated thanks for linking to my blog – I’m starting a new section on my sidebar; the “Mutual Linking Society” – and I will be adding you there of course.

    Thanks again, Darnell. Let’s hope that next year sees some significant progress in Carbon nanotubes so that all of us can get into space.

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