New life for LiftPort?

In his post “A Boost from Balloons?” on his Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle details the possibilities that LiftPort may have in using it’s Tethered Tower application to stay afloat (pun intended).  Alan talks about his conversations with LiftPort’s Michael Laine and their latest demo (the preparation of which was described somewhat painfully here).

LiftPort/Tethered Towers may have one or more potential customers for this product and that may be enough for them to stay solvent and continue on their quest to build a Space Elevator.  Let’s hope so…

More on the Japan Space Elevator Association

Today I heard back from Mr. Shiuchi Ohno, one of the founders of the newly formed Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA).  I had emailed them a few questions – here are his responses;

Q) How long has JSEA been in existence?
A) JSEA is an association just born in this month. We will have first meeting this weekend in Tokyo.  Last year, my friend and I went to Seattle to meet Mr.Michael and Mr. Tomas of Liftport company. We proposed them to start Japanese branch. But they couldn’t decide until now. Then we decided to start actual activity in Japan for the real SE.

Q) What kind of organization is it?  Academic only? General Interest?  Governmental?
A) At first, our activity will stay within general interest. But we are very conscious of academic study and commercial based research and development. We want to make effort to speed them up.

Q) What is the organizations charter?  Are they an information-only group or are they going to actively try and help build a Space Elevator.
A) We have not actual strategy for charter yet. (That’s the theme for this weekend meeting.) One idea for this is to be continuing private organization and found some companies that obey associate’s principles. Those companies will concentrate to build a SE.

So, there you have it.  Mr. Ohno has told me he will email me periodically with updates from the JSEA and I will certainly pass them along as I receive them.

I’ve added a link to their website on the Blogroll section of my sidebar.  Though it is almost all in Japanese, plugging the Japanese text into Babelfish gives a good enough translation to figure out what they are talking about (thanks, Brian, for the tip on Babelfish).

Japan Space Elevator Association

No, I didn’t know that there was one either.  I cannot read Japanese, and there’s no English translation.

I found it via a link on the E-T-C Space Elevator Team website.  It seems that the team will be making a presentation to the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) on July 28th.  I’ll contact their team captain to try and find out how organized the JSEA is and what we might be hearing from them in the future…

I would LOVE IT if the Japanese got into this in a big way.  Here’s a country with the technical know-how, the resources and the balls to pull this off.  And, my wife is of Japanese ancestry – maybe I can use that connection to wangle a ride 🙂

Anniversary of Moon Landing

On this date, 38 years ago, mankind put it’s first footprints on another world (even though the conspiracy theorists think it was all staged).

Yes, it’s only distantly related to a Space Elevator (at least for now), but it’s still worth a note.  Someday, many of us will take the first steps of our journey to the Moon on a Space Elevator…

RussiaToday looks at Space Elevators

The first half of this 25 minute long YouTube video (originally from RussiaToday) is devoted to nanotechnology and Russia’s move into this field of research.  Just after the video’s 10 minute mark, the narrator talks about how carbon nanotubes might be used to build an earth-based Space Elevator.  He theorizes that the climbers might be powered via Solar Energy (rather than ground-based lasers) or that the cable itself might be able to conduct power for the climbers.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-TdY2RxgW4[/youtube]

“Mars is really begging for a Space Elevator”

So says Rob Manning of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in this fascinating interview in Universe Today conducted by Nancy Atkinson.

In this interview, Mr. Manning discusses how difficult it is to actually land anything on Mars that is bigger than the Rovers already sent there.  This is due to both the atmosphere being too thin to be used for aerobraking as we know it today.

“’Mars is really begging for a space elevator,’ said Manning. ‘I think it has great potential. That would solve a lot of problems, and Mars would be an excellent platform to try it.’ But Manning admitted that the technology needed to suspend a space elevator has not yet been invented. The issues with space elevator technology may be vast, even compared with the challenges of landing.”

A really interesting interview – highly recommended.

“Reconverging Technologies: Space, Nano, and Fountains of Paradise”

The Society for the History Of Technology (SHOT) will be holding it’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. in October of this year.  SHOT is an organization dedicated to:

“…the historical study of technology and its relations with politics, economics, labor, business, the environment, public policy, science, and the arts.”

This year, Professor W. Patrick McCray will be presenting a paper entitled “Reconverging Technologies: Space, Nano, and Fountains of Paradise”.  The paper’s abtract states:

“Central to the plot of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1978 book ‘The Fountains of Paradise’ is the concept of a space elevator. His book appeared at a time of renewed international interest in space exploration and space colonization. Within a few years, however, pro-space advocates like K. Eric Drexler turned their attention to promoting nanotechnologies and molecular manufacturing. While Clarke’s vision was, of course, never realized, his idea of a space elevator gained renewed life following the widespread scientific attention paid to novel carbon nanostructures in the 1980s and 1990s. While still in a liminal state that blends fantasy and actual engineering studies, proposals for a space elevator resemble the visionary engineering analyses that marked the early Space Age. This paper explores the reconvergence of space exploration and nanotechnology as witnessed by the interest in space elevator technologies and the engineers advocating them.”

Too bad another event is going to be going on at the same time or I might want to attend 🙂  I’m sure the papers will be published afterwards…

Updates from LiftPort

Over a dozen posts have been put up on the LiftPort blog in the past few days.  Rather than summarize each one of them, I recommend that you just link over to the most recent post (here) and then just work your way backwards through the preceding posts.

Many of the posts have to do with LiftPort photos posted on flickr and comments on their ongoing legal issues.  But the post titled LiftPort’s Tethered Towers, Trials and Triumph: Part 1 conclusion deserves special mention.  Now, I’m a Systems guy from way back.  I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly with designing Systems and putting them together, and I’ve contributed to each at various times.  But I don’t recall participating in a demo as trouble-plagued as the one summarized in this LiftPort post.  If I was in this writer’s shoes, I’d have been seriously dependent on Prozac by the time this demo was completed.  It’s a miracle they got it working at all.

Read it and weep…

“A binocular wearing albino 6 year old that never blinks”

In preparation for this year’s Space Elevator Games, the teams competing hold a weekly online “chat” session, hosted by Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation, the organizer of this year’s (and every year’s) Space Elevator Games.

One of the paramount concerns is SAFETY, for the teams, for the Spaceward crew and especially for the spectators.  Unlike previous years, this year we have an excellent chance of having one or more teams powering their climbers with either Lasers or Microwaves.  Both of these technologies are safe, if proper precautions are taken, and these precautions are discussed in many of our chats, including today’s.

To emphasize his point about how careful the teams must be, Ben was trying to draw a worst-case scenario for them.  He wanted them to make viewing their team entrys safe, even if, in the audience, there was a “a binocular wearing albino 6 year old that never blinks.”

I’m sure it’s possible to imagine an even more worst-case scenario, but I’m sure you get the idea.  And hey, if you are (or you bring) someone who is “a binocular wearing albino 6 year old that never blinks” to the games, make sure you look me up – I’d love to post your picture on my blog 🙂

News from RAMCO I

One of the entrants in this year’s Space Elevator Games is Warr’s RAMCO I, out of Munich, Germany.  They do post news on their website, but I don’t read German.  If you plug the latest news entry from them into one of those online language translators, you get the following:

“The WARRmedia WARR-EX1 was updated with pictures by the Garnix to festival and the test ignition. A lot of fun with it!”

There is also a video, which looks somewhat like what I saw in my neighbor’s backyard on the Fourth of July…

Giant Carbon Dioxide Vacuums

Several weeks ago, I wroteabout technologies available / hoped for on getting rid of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere.  There are a lot of reasons why a Space Elevator “evacuator” would not be practical to use to accomplish this; separating the CO2 from the atmosphere without generating more CO2, pumping it up a “Space Elevator Tube”, gravity pulling it back down into the atmosphere, etc.  In addition, I wonder if we really want to get rid of this stuff – there might come a day when we really need it and we’ll wish we hadn’t thrown it away.

It appears though, that at least one of these problems may be solved.  In this article, the authors announce a technology which will separate CO2 from the atmosphere, and do so with materials that can continually be recycled.  They use standard forms of energy to accomplish this (with the accompanying pollution), but this can be solved by powering this unit with Solar cells, making this a really clean way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere.  The problem, of course, is what do you do with it then.  It’s only stable in a gas form (having already been removed from it’s stable liquid (oil) form or stable solid (coal) form).  You’d have to compress the bejesus out of it – into something like degenerate matter.  Then you could use a Space Elevator to haul it out of the atmosphere and, as a bonus, send it to someplace that could use it (like the moon or Mars).  This would help those bodies develop an atmosphere.  Of course without a magnetic field to protect the life on the body, it probably couldn’t develop in a non-protected manner, but I’ll leave the solution of that problem as an exercise for the reader.

And yes, this post only has a tenuous link to a Space Elevator, but like many others, I’m waiting for the official announcement of the upcoming Space Elevator Games too…

Anyway, the article makes for interesting reading and there is also a link to a video on the post which shows the unit in action.

Space Elevator Presentation from Live Video

This is a generally well-constructed presentation about the possibilities of a Space Elevator, combining many of the SE images floating around the Internet along with pictures from last year’s Space Elevator Games.  They mangled the Carl Sagan quote, and stated (incorrectly, unfortunately) that NASA was interested in the idea of a Space Elevator, but other than that, it was well done.

Based on a comment made in the presentation, about how the Space Elevator Games, with $150K in Prize Money had occurred “earlier this month”, I have to conclude this was posted in October of last year.  However, it just popped up in my Search Engines so I’m linking to it now.

(Update: 16 July, 2007 – The video no longer appears on the website.  However, it is now available via YouTube)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StQMxdQ2RGE[/youtube]

Telstar 1 launched 45 years ago today

Telstar 1, the world’s first active communication satellite, and also a product of the world’s first privately-sponsored space launch, was launched on this date in 1962.  It’s hard to believe that we’ve only had this capability for 45 years.  My kids have no idea what a world without this technology is like – just another sign of how old I’m getting, I guess.

I remember the excitement that surrounded the launch and how my dad and I and the neighbors would go outside at night when a pass was scheduled to be visible to see if we could spot it – often times we could.

The ties between Telstar 1 and a future Space Elevator are many:

  • Communications satellites were the brainchild of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, also the author of The Fountains of Paradise, the Sci-fi book which popularized the concept of Space Elevators.
  • Reducing the cost of satellite launches will be a major reason that a Space Elevator will be built.
  • The launch of Telstar 1 ushered in the age of privately-sponsored Space launches, and my money is on private enterprise to build the first Space Elevator.

The Wikipedia article on Telstar 1 makes for fascinating reading.

(Photo from Wikipedia – click on it for a larger version)

Snowstar update

On the Team Snowstar website, they give a progress report on how/what they are doing, along with some neat photos.  The photo of their climber on a 40 foot tether shows that, on the outside at least, they have a similar design to last year’s entry (though of course there may be changes between now and competition day).

In their latest posting (June 27th), they note:

“In addition to progress on this year’s design, on June 5 we ran the climber in a situation that allowed us to test in real-world conditions, allowing us to refine and verify our design. There are no public test days planned in the near future; however, UBC Snowstar is proud to announce that we will be holding an event on July 21 at Science World. More details will be forthcoming, with instructions on how to get there as the day comes closer.”

Check out their website for more information.

Space Elevators and the angry dwarf (planet)

Well, most of the info about Space Elevators in this humorous podcast is correct, but I’m not so sure about the comparison to bullroarers.  If you can make it through the music, the interview at the end with angry dwarf (planet) is pretty funny…

(Photo of Bullroarers from Budamurra Aboriginal Corporation – really – click on it for a larger version)

On Lasers and Lasermotive

Tom Nugent from Lasermotive, an entrant into the 2007 Space Elevator Games, has put a couple of interesting, laser-related posts on their team blog.

In the first, we find that “cheaper is better”, at least when it comes to seeing in the near Infrared.

And in the second, we learn about safety considerations when working with lasers, even with relatively low-powered ones.

$34,000 = cost to lift one 1kg from earth to the vicinity of Mars

In this post on the Space Elevator Reference, Dr. Bryan Laubscher discusses what it will cost to lift 1kg from the surface of earth to the vicinity of Mars using rocket technology.   Dr. Laubscher asks (and answers) the question:

“My question is: How much exploration, especially manned exploration, of the moon and Mars will we be doing at $34,000 per kilogram? My guess is that we’ll do pretty much what we’ve done over the last 35 years since the last Apollo mission.”

Dr. Laubscher makes a compelling, cost-justified case for a Space Elevator.  Too bad “the concept is not of interest to NASA.”

My money is still on a US business-consortium or a joint venture between Dubai and India to build the first, earth-based Space Elevator…

In a related article, “How to Get to Space – cheap“, Andrey Kobilnyk gives the cost of lifting 1kg from the surface of the earth to LEO ad $19,000.  Dr. Laubscher had given this cost as $10,000.  If Mr. Kobilnyk is correct, then it costs even more to lift one 1kg from earth to the vicinity of Mars.  He, too, argues that a Space Elevator, built from carbon nanotubes, would be a much more cost-effective way to solve this problem…

(Money Graphic courtesy of Money Clip Art Gallery.  Rotating nanotube graphic from FirstScience.com)

Call for organizers for the 2008 Space Elevator Conference

The Space Elevator Reference today announced a call for organizers for the 2008 Space Elevator Conference, expected to be hosted in Seattle, Washington.  From the announcement;

“The purpose of the conference is to bring together scientists, engineers, businessmen, economists, educators, financiers, writers, students and others interested in the Space Elevator for wide-ranging papers and discussion sessions…We are looking for individuals local to Seattle, in the United States and abroad with a deep interest in the Space Elevator and a desire to organize and attend the conference.”

Check out the post for more information.  If you are interested in furthering the “cause” of building a Space Elevator, here’s a good way to get involved.

Spider silk, goats, and the Space Elevator Games

As ScienCentralNews reports, spider silk is strong stuff, “5 times tougher than Kevlar.”  But as they also report in this very interesting article, it’s hard to obtain, in quantity, from spiders.  The story describes a technique of harvesting spider silk from Goat milk.  The idea was to insert gene fragments into goats and then harvest the silk spider from the goat’s milk.

One of the entrants in the 2006 Space Elevator Games Tether Pull competition was a Canadian company called Nexia Biotechnologies.  They licensed this technology and attempted to create a super-strong tether to enter into the Games.  They never showed up to compete, however, and I always wondered why.  This article gives us the probable reason; the spider silk created from this technique was inferior to the real stuff.

A newer technique, using the entire gene sequence of spider silk (instead of just a fraction of it, as was done before) may be in the offing, and this time, instead of splicing this information into goats, it may be spliced into crops.  Cheryl Hayashi, one of the team members who has helped decode the entire spider silk gene sequence states; “That way they could be grown very cheaply, you know, by the acre. And then the silk protein would be extracted from the plant material and this would be the way that we could get very large amounts of spider silks. We could get spider silks by the ton.”

There is also a video about spider silk and spider silk “farming” you can view.  One learns that Black Widow spiders happen to be the best for this use.  Nadia Ayoub, the researcher interviewed, said that farming Black Widows to extract Spider silk was like “farming wolves for meat” – a very interesting comparison.

It’s a shame that spider silk is not strong enough for an earth-based space elevator, but it should work just fine for a lunar-based one.  Here’s hoping this technique becomes practical.

NIAC (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) to close August 31, 2007

As reported today on SpaceRef.com, NIAC, The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, will be closing its doors on August 31st of this year.  Many people, including yours truly (here and here), had reported that NIAC was intending to close, but a last ditch effort was mounted to save it.  Sadly, this effort has failed.

NIAC gives the reason for doing this as follows: “NASA, faced with the constraints of achieving the Vision for Space Exploration, has made the difficult decision to terminate NIAC, which has been funded by NASA since inception.”

Let’s all just be thankful that they closed after they funded Dr. Edwards studies, and not before.

You can read more about this at the NIAC website.

“I must have a few hundred years of bad luck ahead of me”

This headline is a quote from Brian Turner, captain of the Kansas City Space Pirates, and is found in today’s (July 1st, 2007) New York Times Magazine.  He’s referring to all the mirrors he’s broken as part of his effort to build his team’s entry into the Space Elevator Games Climber/Power Beaming contest.  A picture of Brian, happily engaged in his workshop, is on the cover of the same magazine.

The author of the article, Jack Hitt, covers many of the NASA Centennial prizes, and talks about how NASA is using these prizes to reach out to amateur inventors, like Brian, to help reinvigorate its exploration programs.  It’s a fine article and a great read (though I’m going to have to email him about what a “liftport ambassador” really is)…  The article also discusses how Peter Homer won a Centennial prize by building a better Space glove

If you want to read the entire article (which I highly recommend you do), you can either purchase today’s NY Times or you can view the article online here.  The online article also contains a link to a video made about Peter Homer and his winning glove entry.  Of note here is that, like the NASA Tether competition the “Build a better glove” contest also has a destructive test; pumping the glove full of pressurized water until it springs a leak.  Frankly, I think the Tether test is more fun 🙂

And Brian, what kind of dog is that?  Those are the longest legs I’ve ever seen on a dog – it reminds me of the Star Wars AT-AT.

(Photo credits: Jeff Riedel for the New York Times – click on the thumbnails to view a larger version)

Kansas City Space Pirates meet another fund-raising goal

From Brian Turner, captain of the Kansas City Space Pirates:

New Mexico here we come!

We have passed the bottom fundraising threshold and now have enough Contributions, Sponsors, Assets(From 2006) and Pledges to finish the climber and make it to the competition in New Mexico!

We are now calling ourselves a “Participant”. That means that we can buy enough solar cells to make the climber function but not enough to secure a win. We will still be working to raise more money to fill out the solar cell budget. We can buy them in batches costing about $1,750. Look at the attached graphic to see the fundraising goals.

Budget amount (Competitiveness)
$15,000 (Land Lubber)
$32,000 (Participant)
$37,000 (Contender)
$42,000 (In-The-Money)
$53,000 (Dominating)

Those of you who have pledged, I would like to encourage you to send in your contribution as we are ordering the parts and building as fast as the money allows.

We currently have the parts needed to test every aspect of this years climber designs. In the next three weeks we should be testing each component and be able to come up with solid performance predictions. Our current predictions are based on specs and estimates.

In case you have not heard the venue will not be in Las Vegas. It looks like we will be at the fairgrounds that held the qualifications last year. This is good news as we really liked the facilities there and kinda know our way around Las Cruces.

Be sure and check out the New York Times Magazine in this Sunday’s paper for the Centennial Challenges article. I think my messy garage will be in there.

Brian Turner
Captain,
KC Space Pirates

So, this is good news – the more competition, the better.  Last year, the KC Space Pirates certainly put on a good show and I think we can count on them doing it again this year.  Whether or not they’re going to be able to successfully compete against one or more Laser-driven units, only time will tell.  Click on the Pirate ship picture for a larger version.  And, as Brian notes, please be sure and check out tomorrows NY Times.

Finally, you’ll note that Brian talks about Las Vegas and New Mexico as possible venues for the Space Elevator Games.  Yes, these were possible sites, but nothing has been announced yet.  And, if I were a betting man, well, I’d be hesitant to put money on either site.  More on that (very) soon…

“Wet and Breezy Internet”

Joe Julian writes on the LiftPort blog:

“I’m writing this from the Tethered Towers demo. It’s rainy and windy with 45mph gusts at 500 feet. We’re only using one balloon, which is not enough lift, but we still have a working wireless internet system.

Thanks to everyone that helped. More later.”

I’m looking forward to the details and, hopefully, LiftPort will be able to generate some business from this demo.

The Andromeda Connection

One of the new contestants in this year’s Space Elevator Games is The Andromeda Connection.  If you visit their website, you learn that their captain, Michael Harvey, “…has a keen interest in science in general, particularly that involving space travel and electronics. Over the past 48 years Mike has developed skills in fields ranging from electronics and programming to residential construction and mechanics.”

On their website, they have a Progress Report and a Photo Album.  They’ve also posted a couple of videos at YouTube showing tests of their Climber’s drive system.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Nv29HapqBQ[/youtube]

.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9DYQBHKvBw[/youtube]

And, I think we’re back…

All of the blog upgrades are now done and everything seems to be working OK.  It’s nice that software developers continually upgrade their programs and provide bug fixes, but it does get annoying at times to have to do these constant upgrades.  This is my third upgrade this year (it’s only June) and I have skipped others that I could have done.  Once upon a time, I was a software developer myself and, having to work with my customers to upgrade their systems, I always tried to make it as painless as possible.  But it’s never completely painless…

So, for the moment, anyway, we’re on the current release of WordPress (2.2.1).  All of the security issues in the old release have been (supposedly) plugged – now we just have to wait for the hackers to find the holes in this release 🙂  Even the spelling checker works now!  But WordPress still can’t handle whitespace very well.  The pre 2.0 releases handled it just fine – if you wanted a couple of blank lines in your post, just hit the Return bar a couple of times and there you go.  Now, all of the extra whitespace is automatically deleted by the editor, an attempt, I suppose, to force everyone to modify the .css files instead.  Of course that complicates future upgrades…  WordPress has now also made Widgets the preferred method of maintaing the Sidebar (Widgets used to be available as a plugin, now it’s part of core code).  I could have kept all of my old sidebar hacks, but did want to upgrade to the new method, and that, of course, also complicated things.  They have Widgets called “Text Boxes”, basically places where you can plug in HTML code and place them on the sidebar where you want.  But Text boxes can’t handle php.  For that you need a plugin (Execphp), so I had to install that, too.  But at the end of the day it all seems to work and, I hope, future upgrades will be less lengthy…

I’ve also upgraded to the current release of the WordPress theme I use, Blix Krieg.  It is an offshoot of the original Blix theme, one which does not seem to be maintained anymore.  Blix Krieg is maintainted by theDuck, an Aussie who seems like a nice chap.  And the theme works flawlessly.

I’ve also dumped Sitemeter – it was just so unreliable.  It lost several days of statistics for me on more than one occasion, and I’ve long suspected it if undercounting my site visitors.  In it’s place, I’ve installed StatCounter.  Perhaps it’s just a busy day today, but already my site stats are higher than before.

Finally, I’ve also fixed (I hope) my RSS feeds.  I was using Feedburner but discovered, much to my dismay, that somehow I was burning two Feedburner feeds.  Perhaps this is why they weren’t working properly.  I’d like to thank all of my readers who took the time to either drop an comment or email to me to let me know how my RSS feed was working (or not) for them.  Hopefully, this is a solved problem now, too.

As always, if you run into something on my blog that doesn’t work, please let me know.

Now all I have to do is to get the long delayed photo gallery up and running and I’ll be all set…

We’re upgrading again…

I’m upgrading to WordPress 2.2.1 and Blix Krieg 2.2 today, Monday, June 25th.  So, if things look funky when you visit, check back in in a couple of hours and all should be set right.

I’m also re-doing my Feedburner Feed (it got messed up somehow) and adding a few more.  So the results will be, hopefully, “the latest and greatest”.  Finally, I’m dropping my Sitemeter stats – they’re just too unreliable – and replacing them with Feedburner stats.

Thanks for your patience…

The BBC visits LaserMotive

One of the new entrants into this year’s Space Elevator Games is LaserMotive.  Now, I’m not privy to their plans or designs, but with a name like “LaserMotive” and a picture of a 1kw laser on their blog (and also shown here), I’m hopeful that  we will actually have at least one laser-powered climber in this year’s Games (note that USST brought a laser to last year’s competition, but couldn’t get it working in time).  It would be very cool to have multiple laser-powered vehicles competing this year; real competition using power-beaming devices envisoned to eventually power a real Space Elevator.

The project manager at LaserMotive is Tom Nugent, the same Tom Nugent late of LiftPort.  He emailed me a couple of days ago to point out a new entry in their blog; it seems that they have been visited by the BBC to “to interview us and to video some of LaserMotive’s early hardware during May as part of a documentary they’re working on about future technhology...”.

All I can say is “way cool”…

USST still has to be considered the favorites in this year’s Games.  They were the best team running in the first two competitions, missing out on the prize money by only 2 seconds last year.  But knowing Tom Nugent like I do, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to give USST very stiff competition.

(Click on the thumbnail, or visit the Lasermotive blog to view a larger version of the image of a 1kw laser)

Upcoming LiftPort-Tethered Towers Demo

From the LiftPort blog, Michael Laine tells us about an upcoming demo, on June 28th, for a Tethered Tower.  All are welcome to attend, especially potential customers.  Michael states that this demo will show how “Space Elevator related technology to solve real world, down-to-earth problems in Communications, Observation and Weather Monitoring.”

For more details, check out the blog entry, here.

“Space Doughnut”

Here’s a depressing view of the first trip on the world’s first Space Elevator.

Why would 200 dignitaries from the world’s various nations beat each other to death bare-handedly?

There was a short story written some time ago (“Air Raid“, by John Varley) about people from a future earth, an earth in near-disaster status due to global pollution / warming, who would travel to the past, replacing live passengers on airplanes that were about to crash with matching corpses.  These live humans would be returned to the future to help carry on the species.  Come to think of it, there was a movie (“Millennium“) based on this story too, starring Kris Kristofferson (no, I’m not on drugs).

Anyway, perhaps something similar happened to this Space Elevator trip.  Future humans, having mastered time travel, went to the past to gather up 200 people of different races & nationalities, perhaps to increase the future gene pool.  They left 200 fake bodies to cover their tracks…

If you have a better guess, let’s hear it…

Second Life and LiftPort

According to the LiftPort Blog;

“I have been commissioned by LiftPort to create a Virtual LiftPort group in the game of Second Life and to create a space elevator there. The vision and purpose behind this project is to bring the space community together and get the word out about what we are doing…I am still recruiting people who are interested in becoming involved with this project. I can be contacted via email at justin.schneider [AT] liftport.com or at my ingame avatar named Elevator Kidd. I have formed a group ingame called LiftPort Group and it is open invite at the moment so anyone is interested can join and stay posted on what is going on.”

You can read the full blog entry here.

Space Prizes Blog

One of my favorite blogs is Space Prizes, THE definitive site for all things Space Prizes related.  Of course the author covers the Space Elevator Games, but also the other NASA Centennial Challenges, X Prize Cup, The Heinlein Prize and on and on.  He also has an exhaustive set of links on the blog’s sidebar.

If you’re interested in keeping current with any and all of the Space Prizes, this is the most complete blog I know of.  Check it out…

“The Moon is Red”

A “Future History” blog posting from The Divine Mr. M.  In it he postulates the breakup of the USA, the reconquista of the Southwest USA back into the arms of Mexico, the ascendance of Hispanic (and Chinese) power and, above all, a Spanish Space Elevator (“El Tallo“, The Stalk) located in Quito, Ecuador.

A very interesting read…

Model a Space Elevator

CPAN now has some Perl Libraries which allow you to model a Space Elevator (these modules posted by Daniel Brooks).  I’m not a Perl programmer, so am not sure if I’m going to mess around with it, but if you’re into both Space Elevators and PERL, this is probably a pretty nifty tool.

If anyone wants to set this up and report on their results, I’d be happy to post them here on my blog.

And, if you want to know what CPAN is, Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation…

KC Space Pirates appear on Walt Bodine Show

On June 11th, KC Space Pirates captain Brian Turner and team member Frank Smith were interviewed on a one-hour long show by Kansas City broadcaster Walt Bodine.  Walt’s website is here and you can listen to the interview here.

In the interview, Brian mentioned that he and his team was also going to be featured in the July 1st edition of the NY Times, so I’m looking forward to that also.

The return of Punkworks?

Punkworks was a Canadian team entrant into the 2006 Space Elevator Games Climber (Power Beaming) event  Their climber was Microwave powered, the only one like this in the tournament.  Unfortunately, they were unable to compete because they just couldn’t get their system working in time.  It was a real shame; many of us, including the event organizers, were looking for someone, anyone, to compete using other than spotlights or solar power.

Punkworks is still not listed yet as an official entrant into the 2007 Space Elevator games, but an entry on their blog leads me to believe that they are hoping to compete this year anyway.  It says, in part,

“After taking a long winter hiatus, our team has a fresh outlook for 2007 but has not forgotten the lessons learned from last year’s competition. The tests and redesign will ultimately determine whether the team will compete in October. In the meantime, a notice of interest has been submitted to the Spaceward Foundation in regards to Punkworks participation in this year’s contest. The team has also garnered outside interest from a silent partner if the beam tests are successful and prove to have enough beam power.”

Here’s hoping they make it – I’d love to see them give it a real shot at this year’s competition.

One note; their blog entry says that the competition will be in October.  That HAS NOT YET BEEN DECIDED.  As I’ve written before, the time and venue for this event are not yet finalized.  When they are, they’ll be posted on the Elevator2010 website and on this blog.

“The concept is not of interest to NASA”

This quote is taken from Dr. Brad Edward’s PowerPoint presentation posted on the Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settlements website.  This presentation, titled “A Space Elevator for the Moon”, proposed that two, earth-based Space Elevators be built to supply the materials needed to do Lunar exploration in a robust way.  It’s quite persuasive, with the only caveat being the technology: “Immature but quickly developing”.  The advantages are clear; greatly reduced launch costs and greatly reduced launch risk.

You can find the PowerPoint presentation here and the abstract of his speech here (Bob Munck alert – it’s a pdf file.  Dr. Edwards abstract is on page 62).

Hopefully all is not bleak, though.  A new administration will be elected next year and, while I have no reason to believe that they would encourage NASA to be more innovative, they could hardly make it worse…

Micrometeorites…

I subscribe to Marc Boucher’s daily emails from his SpaceRef.com site.  They are very interesting and I almost always find something in every email which fascinates me.

In his Friday, June 8th edition, there was a link to a NASA site showing some micrometeorite damage suffered by the ISS.  I’ve posted a thumbnail here and you can click on it to view a larger version (warning; it’s a 1.6MB file).  The NASA URL also has links to that image and a lower resolution one.  They don’t post a “credit” for the photo, but the story leads me to believe it’s one of the Russian astronauts currently up there.

Anyway, I’ve posted this here as this hazard, along with others, will be something that a Space Elevator ribbon and Climber will have to deal with.  The picture shows a hole poked in an insulation blanket – I’d have liked to find out what kind of damage, if any, was suffered by the module itself.

And, if you don’t already subscribe to these emails, I’d highly recommend you do so.  Just visit SpaceRef.com and sign up.

KC Space Pirates Saturday demo is off…

From Brian Turner, fearless leader of the KC Space Pirates;

Well during the demo Friday we shelled the tranny, broke the anti-rotation rod and de-laminated some of the mirrors. The climber is in for several hours of repair. And we also burned up most of our personal energy setting up the whole thing. So rather than have everyone come to a static display of a wounded climber we decided to cancel.

The good new is that the weather was beautiful. The audience was patient and the New York times got some good shots. The artical is slated for the July 1st Sunday edition of the New York Times. The paper should be available in local book stores. The magazine is an insert in the regular Sunday paper. The article is about the NASA centennial challenges and we were the team picked for coverage of the Beamed Power Competition. They also will be covering the space suit glove competition and the Moon dirt digging challenges.

More good news, We have been asked to be on the Walt Bodine Show on Monday Morning. 89.3 FM 10 to 11 AM http://www.kcur.org/waltbodine.html

Talk to you more later.

Brian
Captain,
Kansas City Space Pirates

Wow, it sounds like the Romans gave Archimedes all he could handle…

Demo of Archimedes Death Ray (aka KC Space Pirates mirrors) moved…

As I had blogged about earlier, Brian Turner and the Kansas City Space Pirates are providing a demonstration of their system for interested observers.  I had noted that the location might be changed and, indeed, it has.  From Brian;

We had to change the location of the demo this weekend. It is no longer at  the polo club location.
We are now at Tri-Lateral Sales (TLS for short).  This is the back yard of a warehouse located in the river bottoms south of Worlds-of-Fun. This is our usual test field.

The address is
3801 NE Kimball Dr.
KCMO 64152
My cell
816-716-7077

The times remain the same
Fri Noon to 3:30
Sat Noon to 3:30
Myself and some of my teammates will be there earlier. We will be out back.

This location is a little odd in that everyone needs to sign a hold harmless agreement as part of the owners giving us permission to demo there. Find me when you get there to sign in.  The business there will be in operation Friday so try not to block the trucks and park a bit away from the front door.  You might want to bring a lawn chair.

Brian

Jerome Pearson interview on the Space Elevator

Kevin Coglin (I hope I’m spelling his name right) has posted several videos on YouTube, interviewing various participants and presenters at the currently ongoing symposium on Lunar Settlements at Rutgers University.  The one he’s posted which is of most interest to Space Elevator fans is this one (below) with Jerome Pearson.  I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting or even listening to Mr. Pearson, so this YouTube video was a real treat.  Thanks, Kevin…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9608XRE-D0[/youtube]
.
I had posted about this symposium earlier here.  Also at this symposium, Dr. Brad Edwards is scheduled to present his proposal on using earth-based Space Elevators to satisfy NASA’s lunar settlement requirements.  I hope I get a chance to post on his presentation soon…

“A Space Elevator for Carbon Dioxide”

No, not really, but I liked the title 🙂  The author is talking about an idea of UCLA physicist Alfred Wong to use a laser to alter CO2 molecules so that they would leave the earth’s atmosphere at the pole’s , i.e. creating a “Space Elevator” so that our excess CO2 would be dumped into space.

Other than the title, the link this posting has to a “real” space elevator is an email sent to me by reader Howard Katseff over a year ago, where he wondered if somehow a Space Elevator “tube” could be used to funnel a power plant’s emissions into space.  The problem with this idea (and with Alfred Wong’s proposal) is just the sheer mass of CO2 we spew into the atmosphere.  According to a couple of websites I’ve looked at, we, as a planet, generate well over 20 million metric tons of CO2 each and every DAY.  That’s a lot of gassified dry ice, more than we can deal with via Space Elevator tubes or lasers.

There’s another issue too.  Are we so sure we want to get rid of this stuff?  We, as a species, might need it some day.  It would be hell to have thrown it all away and then find out that we need it to solve another global problem…  Conservation, sequestration and zero-emission power plant and vehicles – I think that’s the only way to go (IMHO)…

(Photo credit: Nick Russill)

“Average Human Height now less than 100 Nanotubes”

A catchy blog posting title.  The author, Ravi Krishnamurthy, notes that since carbon nanotubes nearly two centimeters long can now be grown, stacking 100 of these would be taller than the average human height.  I guess that’s one way to measure progress.

Ravi’s blog posting is here and the original press release is here.

(Click on the thumbnail for a slightly larger version of the picture.  Photo credit: V. Shanov, M. Schulz, University of Cincinnati)

Modern Archimedes (aka KC Space Pirates) to perform demonstration

From Brian Turner and the Kansas City Space Pirates, one of the entrants into both last year’s and this year’s Space Elevator Games;

The KC Space Pirates will be doing an “All up” demo this Friday and Saturday with the action happening from Noon to 3:30 each day. We will have a 50 ft crane rented for both days. This is for the benefit of a photographer from the New York Times Magazine, but I want to invite all of our fans and supporters out to take a look.

We will need volunteers to aim the mirrors and I need to get a count of how many will be there, So if you could please RSVP and state if you will be coming and if you want to aim a mirror that would be helpful. But feel free to stop by anyway.

We are planning a special treat at 3:00 PM on Sat. We will try the heliobeaming mirrors out as an Archimedes Death Ray. Surprisingly we have never had the chance to do this before. So it could be a historical event, or a bust. At over 500 square feet, our mirrors are bigger than the ones used on the TV show Mythbusters. We will try to set the focal distance to the “Standard” of 150 ft.

Location:
10016 NW Skyview Ave
KCMO 64154

When:
6/8 and 6/9 12:00 to 3:30 PM

Directions:
I-29 toward the airport
Exit Tiffany springs Take a right Toward Embassy Suites(East) Follow Tiffany springs parkway through 3 traffic circles heading east. (1st right then 2nd right then 3rd right.)  The former polo Club is on the NW corner of Tiffany Springs and Skyview. The driveway is right on the north edge of the 3rd traffic circle. Pull past the house and big barn to the parking lot on the right.  Park on the black part of that lot.  We have rented a crane but not a port-o-potty so take care.

Hope to see you all there.

Captain Brian Turner
brian [AT] kcspacepirates.com
Kansas City Space Pirates

This sounds very cool and is the first communication of many I hope to receive from the various teams detailing demos they’ll be doing of their equipment.

What they need to do is to focus this beam onto a lake or pond and have a model sailboat travel through the focal point.  Or, to update it to more modern times, get a model airplane and fly it through the focal point.  Seeing either do so and then spontaneously burst into flames would generate some great footage!

One note; Brian tells me the location may change.  So, be sure to check their website for the latest information if you plan to attend the demo.  Brian, you will be shooting some video and posting it on your site or on YouTube, yes?

RSS – Is it working for The Space Elevator Blog?

For some funky reason, my blog doesn’t appear to show up in my RSS feeds – I don’t know why.  It used to, and then stopped.  It may have had something to do with WordPress’s Feedburner plugin.  I installed it and activated it and… zippo.  So I went back to the old (WordPress) feed, but that, too, is now… zippo.

So, I’ve reactivated the Feedburner plugin and we’ll see what happens.  In the meantime, if any of you use RSS aggregators, could you please send me an email or post a comment on this post and let me know if the RSS feed is working for you (or not)?  I would greatly appreciate it…

More woes for LiftPort

Over at the Space Elevator Reference, Marc Boucher is reporting that the State of Washington issued (on April 18th of this year) a “Statement of charges and notice of intent to enter order to cease and desist, impose fines, and charge costs” order against Michael Laine and LiftPort.  Marc links to the Securities Administration document; you can also find it here.

I don’t know what the “record” is for these types of orders; how many of those that are issued which actually get enforced, but this certainly can’t be good news for LiftPort, whatever the outcome.

I’ve emailed Michael Laine to ask him for his comments on this; knowing Michael, I’m sure he’s not going to duck the issue…