I hate it when I’m wrong, and I think I might have been wrong about the Space Elevator and Solar Power Satellites (SPS).  I’ve had some ‘really smart people’ look over the calculations I put on my blog last year, and I think they’ve found a significant mistake.  I’ve got some more checking to do, and, if I was wrong, it means that SPS could indeed have a major role to play in solving the earth’s energy / pollution issues.

It also means I may have to redo my presentation to the conference, and THAT’s due tomorrow afternoon.  Hence I have to spend the rest of the evening working on it and will have no time to put up conference posts tonight.

But, as I said in my earlier post on the subject, I would LOVE to be wrong on this and it looks like I may have been.  I certainly hope so.

Stay tuned…

It’s now nearly 5:00pm here in Redmond, Washington and this is the first real break I’ve had all day (I’m not complaining).  There was just a couple of presentations this morning, concentrating on the legal issues perhaps facing a future space elevator.  Then we began the Four Pillar workshops.  There will be much more about these Pillars a little later – they may be (hope to be) the most important outcome of this conference.

So, please forgive me for not keeping you more up-to-date; I’ll be putting up some posts later this evening…

We have a large Japanese presence at the conference this year, and they have made a tremendous contribution to the proceedings.  In addition, to making several presentations (and some very exciting announcements), they have brought an exhibit, a DVD we all watched during the “Mixer” hour this evening and probably a few other things I’m forgetting to mention.  They even brought some gifts for yours truly, some Pocky for my kids and a copy of the Edwards-Westing book translated into Japanese (a book I blogged about earlier).  I’ll cover the individual Japanese presentations later, but wanted to put up some pictures and notes about them now.

The Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) was created last year.  According to Akira Tsuchida, one of the directors of JSEA (and the team leader of the Earth-Track-Controllers (E-T-C), an entrant in last year’s (and hopefully) this year’s Space Elevator Games), JSEA now has over 40 members and is growing.  It has been created to promote the idea of developing a Space Elevator and to educate the Japanese public about the advantages it can bring.  In many ways, the Japanese public is much more educated about and receptive to the idea of a Space Elevator than we Americans are.  It has been part of their literature / fiction for many years.

The first JSEA Conference is scheduled for November 15-16 this year (an event I will make every effort to attend).  We’ve been invited to stay at the “Tube Hotel” and to take a guided tour of Akihabara (the electronic bazaar in Tokyo, a place I’ve already visited) as part of the conference.  We might even get the chance to hear Akira demonstrate his Karaoke skills 🙂

JSEA also plans on creating the first annual JSEA Space Elevator games in 2009 and is working on hosting an International Space Elevator Conference in the Sultanate of Brunei, also in 2009.

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Here are a couple of pictures of a Space Elevator and climber and station, built entirely out of Legos.  My own house is full of Legos – before my son grew out of them, he put together Lego kits of various Harry Potter characters and locales, Star Wars characters (including a big Yoda) and who knows what else.  But this Space Elevator representation is something special…

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Finally, here are some of the books that the Japanese contingent brought, books that contain a Space Elevator and/or Space Elevator theme in them.

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Yes, the Japanese contingent has made its presence felt.  How much this will contribute to the building of a real Space Elevator only time will tell.  But they seem sincere and dedicated (and even have come up with some (Japanese) government funding, so they must be taken seriously.  I, for one, am glad to have them on board, and I’m sure that everyone else here at the conference feels the same way…

I’ve given up trying to chronicle everything as it is happening at the conference – there’s just too much going on.  If you’re a fan of the Space Elevator, this conference is truly “red meat” (unless you’re a vegetarian, of course, in which this conference is truly “red beans” 🙂 )…

Seriously, the quantity and quality of the content today was very high, exceeding even my lofty expectations.  The conference venue is also superb – the Microsoft Conference center is one of the best I’ve ever been at.  Every place to sit has desk space, outlets, access to excellent wireless network, etc.  It allows you to concentrate on the conferece proceedings, which is the way it should be…

Earlier today, I tried to chronicle things as they were happening, but it was causing me to miss too much of the Conference’s content.  So, I’m going to put up a few more posts now of some of the days highlights.  It’s probably all I will be able to manage tomorrow, too.  However, I now have lots of blogging material for the next week or two, so expect a barrage of Conference reports in the near future.

So, some miscellaneous notes from today before I return to covering some of the presentations…

One of the great things about being involved in the Space Elevator effort is all of the wonderful people I’ve been able to meet.  Three of them are in this picture.  From left to right, they are Bryan Laubscher, Martin Lades and Alan Boyle.  Bryan and Martin are the conference chairs and organizers (along with a few others who I will mention later on).  Bryan and Martin were also on the Space Show a few days ago, discussing the then upcoming conference (an event I chronicled here).  Alan, of course, is the Science Editor at MSNBC.com and the editor/owner of the Cosmic Log.  He’s a great journalist, the owner of numerous awards, is wonderful to work with and already has an excellent post up on his Cosmic Log about the conference.

This is another picture of Alan along with Peter Swan (on the right), my co-chair of the Social/PR pillar.  More about the pillars tomorrow, when we actually start the Pillar sessions.

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And here is a picture of Ben Shelef of the Spaceward foundation (on the left) and Andy Price.  Andy sends out “email nuggets” regarding carbon nanotube developments – interesting stuff that I often blog about.  Can you tell that they have slightly different heights? 🙂

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Finally, here is a picture of Peter Swan and, on the left, Jerome Pearson, one of the inventors of the Space Elevator (along with Yuri Artsutanov) and a presenter in a couple of sessions today (more on these later).  It was a real thrill for me to be able to meet Mr. Pearson today.  If we can ever get a Space Elevator to work, humanity will owe a great debt to him and Mr. Artsutanov.

During the lunch break today, Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation talked to the crowd about the Space Elevator Games, both Power-Beaming / Climber and Tether competitions.

In this picture, however, Ben is responding to a presentaton given earlier by Ivan Bekey, highlighting potential problems to the Space Elevator, this case space debris.  Ben is pointing out that the problem is not as bad as feared; the great majority of debris is so small that it’s damage to the elevator is ‘manageable’, while the larger objects are so infrequent that moving the elevator can take care of it.

Mmmm, chocolate fudge cake.  A note that Randy Lieberman (who spoke earlier) was responsible for the delicious lunch today.  Thanks Randy!

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The conference started off with the keynote address by Dr. Bradley C. Edwards.  Dr. Edwards summarized developments of how we got to where we are today in Space Elevator development and things that hopefully / should happen in the near future.  A few pictures:

Here is Dr. Edwards in front of his opening slide.

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Dr. Edwards with another slide.

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THIS is interesting.  There is now a study being done by Sotheby’s International to see if a Space Elevator ‘ride’ might be viable.  People who have visited DisneyWorld or MGM and have been on their various theme rides (riding through asteroids or whatever) know that something like this can be made very realistic.  This ‘ride’ could be combined with an audience-viewable research center and the profits of all this could go to real Space Elevator research.  This is a really cool idea and I hope it comes to fruition.  I’ll keep you all posted.

Here we go.  It’s now 9:10 am, Pacific time, and the 2008 Space Elevator Conference is underway.

Two bits of breaking news.  First, the team from TXL has dropped out of this year’s Space Elevator Games.  I spoke with David Nemir from TXL (who is here at the conference and is giving a talk on “Thermoelectric technology and the Space Elevator) and he told me that his Board was afraid that the Space Elevator competition was taking away from the focus of their company.  I don’t know what’s the matter with these people, trying to stay focused and make money.  Geez…  Anyway, we’re very sorry to see them go, I (and everyone else) wanted to see how their thermoelectric technology would work and it would have been nice to have at least one team which was corporate sponsored.  Oh well, when their Board sees a big check going to someone this year, they can think “gee – this could have been us.”

Second, the support mechanism for the competition tether this year has been changed from a balloon to a helicopter.  For various reasons, the balloon idea just didn’t work out and this other plan has been put into place.  It’s simplified some issues tremendously, but has complicated others, of course.  More about this later.

Over at the Space Elevator Reference website, Marc Boucher tells us that he’s looking for volunteers to help him with ‘taking the Space Elevator Reference to a whole new level’ and that he hopes to attend at least part of the upcoming Space Elevator Conference.

Hope to see you there Marc…

Only two more days until the 2008 Space Elevator Conference begins.  It’s being sponsored, in part, by Microsoft and is being held at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington.

The Microsoft connection has been noted in at least one place in the blogosphere by a Microsoft employee.  In Under an Orange Sky, blogger Cian Hayes, in a post titled ‘Windows Vista Space Elevator Edition’ notes that “The company newsletter today had a blurb about a space elevator conference being held on the microsoft campus this month.  Yes, one of those elevators.  Apparently Microsoft is sponsoring the conference, which is interesting because we’re not really known for throwing our weight behind crackpot schemes…”

GeekNews also notes the Microsoft connection.

My own Microsoft story…  I’ve never worked FOR Microsoft, but I have worked with their technical people.  My last job (before I retired) was at a Silicon-valley based company called Portal Software (now owned by Oracle).  We had product (Infranet) which Microsoft was implementing to help them bill for their Internet services.  I had to attend a meeting with the Microsoft people in Bellevue and, just the way my time/schedule worked out, I was the first person to arrive at the restaurant where the meeting was being held.  I couldn’t find where to sit down so I asked the waiter where the table was.  He asked me which company was hosting the dinner and, when I told him ‘Microsoft’, he replied ‘Oh, the Borg’.  Well, I thought it was funny…

Seriously, we’re all grateful to Microsoft for hosting this conference.  This isn’t the first time they’ve been involved with something related to the Space Elevator.  As I related in an earlier post, Bryan Laubscher once gave a presentation at Microsoft and one can only hope that they do see some long-term benefit to this.  Nothing like having one of the powers of the Universe behind you…

Only two more days – see you there!

Picture of Jean-Luc Picard from here.
Microsoft Logo from here (and yes, I think I’ve complied with all of the copyright restrictions…)

Several days ago, I put up a post about LaserMotive and their “Mark II” version of a treadmill that they’re using this year to test out their climber.

In the latest post on the LaserMotive Blog, team member Tom Nugent shows off the latest accomplishments of the new LaserMotive drive mechanism.

Very impressive – let’s see how it holds up in the competition…

The YouTube video of the test is both on the LaserMotive blog and here, below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKaYHVTl2tM[/youtube]

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Check out the LaserMotive Blog for the rest of the story and a link to the press release they issued about this test.

I was recently made aware of a new documentary film, ‘Ropewalk‘, the Story of Rope.  According to the email about it (in the yahoogroups space-elevator email group) and the website itself, this is a story of rope, from early times all the way to possible future uses (including a Space Elevator).

The site has a trailer in which looks very interesting (if you’re into these kinds of things, like I am).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLhtAJsJ6Co[/youtube]

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You can buy the video from the website or you can rent it from Netflix.

As a ‘child of the 60’s’, I especially enjoyed the ‘Hemp for Victory’ portion of the trailer…

There are only 7 more days until the beginning of the 2008 Space Elevator Conference.  If you haven’t made your reservations yet, it’s not too late to do so (but you better hurry).

In addition to the program, listed on the conference website, steps will be taken to start a sustained, international effort to lobby and coordinate efforts for the building of a Space Elevator.  Attempts have been made in the past to begin a sustained ‘Four Pillars’ program for the development of a Space Elevator, but without much success.  We have reasons to hope and believe that this year will be different.  In addition to just the general feeling that this is a good idea, we now have international resources (EuroSpaceward and the Japan Space Elevator Association) which weren’t there before.  And, the proceedings of this conference will be published, something which will be marked as an important starting point for this effort.

So, if you’re truly interested in making a Space Elevator ‘happen’, now is the time to get involved.  We would love to have you…

In a posting on the LaserMotive blog, Tom Nugent tells us about upgrades to the ‘treadmill’ used to ‘exercise’ the LaserMotive climber.

As mentioned in their blog post, they brought last year’s ‘1.0’ version to the Space Elevator Games where it made a very impressive appearance in Space Elevator row.  This year’s version is improved and will, hopefully, help lead to a good showing by the LaserMotive team.

Just a few days ago, many of us marked the 100th anniversary of the ‘Tunguska event’, an exploding comet or asteroid which caused massive destruction in Siberia.

In a recent article on SpaceRef.com, there now appears to be some additional proof to the theory that another asteroid hit (or exploded just above) the earth (in Canada) 12,900 years ago and may have caused, among other things, the extinction of an early human habitation of North America, the Clovis civilization.

Ken Tankersly, the scientist who lead the research team (and who, ironically enough, had started this research to disprove this theory) was quoted as saying; “The ultimate importance of this kind of work is showing that we can’t control everything,” he says. “Our planet has been hit by asteroids many times throughout its history, and when that happens, it does produce climate change.”

Yeah, and population extinctions, too.  But cosmic collisions of this sort are something we CAN control, if only we show the forward-looking viewpoint necessary to adequately fund a) a ‘SpaceWatch’ (an elegant term coined by, I believe, the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke) to find these cosmic killers and b) a Space Elevator with which to be able to rapidly launch whatever we may need to divert/destroy them.

This is an excellent article and also mentions a number of upcoming TV shows about asteroids which appear worth watching.

Update – another article on SpaceRef.com reports on the winners of the “Move an Asteroid” 2008 competition.

100 years ago today, something ‘cosmic’ happened in (or rather ‘over’) Tunguska, in eastern Russia.

There are stories and postings about this all over the Internet; Space.com has posted its take here and, of course, Wikipedia weighs in here.

The Planetary Society hosted a press conference today; “Target Earth: How Prepared Are We for Another Tunguska?”  Assuming that they put this online (and I’m sure they will), I’ll link to it.

While bouncing around the ‘net, looking for info on events commemorating this event, I came across this website, “Planetary Defense: In defense of the future”.  I am limited on the amount of surfing I can do at the moment, as I’m on vacation (in the Canadian Maritimes) and have only sporadic access to the Interent.  However, this site looks pretty interesting and I’ll be checking it out more in the future.

Anyway, all of the events today point to one thing; the Earth is sitting in a cosmic shooting gallery; it’s only a matter of time before something comes our way again.  We can sit here with our thumbs up our butt and hope for the best or we can proactively a) look for these suckers and b) develop the technology to deal with them.  Fortunately, we are now beginning to take concrete steps to protect ourselves; we can only hope that these efforts continue and intensify.

A Space Elevator would be very handy, indeed, if we had to get large amounts of ‘stuff’ out of our gravity well and into position to defend ourselves.  It is one of the most important reasons to develop one.

This is cool.  The Discovery Channel has put together a select list of happening / on-the-drawing-board projects and dubbed them ‘The world’s nine largest science projects’.

The Space Elevator makes the list along with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, a fusion reactor (ITER), the ANTARES underwater neutrino detecting array and several others.

Lots of neat science stuff in this web page…

One of the ‘no-brainer’ applications for a Space Elevator is the ability to quickly launch large quantities of ‘stuff” into orbit and beyond, ‘stuff’ that may be needed to change the orbit or destroy an asteroid headed our way.

Of course, we need to be able to see these little ‘cosmic challenges’ before we can do anything about them.  And that makes this article interesting;

“Canada is building the world’s first space telescope designed to detect and track asteroids as well as satellites. Called NEOSSat (Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), this spacecraft will provide a significant improvement in surveillance of asteroids that pose a collision hazard with Earth and innovative technologies for tracking satellites in orbit high above our planet.”

The article goes on to say that they are expecting to launch this satellite in 2010.

A couple of months ago, we heard the “Mobile Home Astrophysicist’s” take on Space Elevators.  Recently posted on YouTube, we now have the concept of a Space Elevator explained by the Midnight Tutor.

His explanation was a bit hazy as to how climbers would actually ascend the cable and his cable is 48K miles long instead of the 60K miles.  But the gist of his explanation is generally correct and does serve as a ‘quick and dirty’ introduction to the concept.

He also talks about using the Space Elevator to put payloads into LEO, scramjets and other fun and games stuff…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG3nGFnE7oc[/youtube]

I received a note a few days ago from David J. Williams, the author of a new book; “The Mirrored Heavens“.  In his email to me, David writes:

“I’m the author of the just-released THE MIRRORED HEAVENS, which was published on May 20th by Random House’s Bantam Spectra.  The book centers on events following the destruction of the Phoenix Elevator, a LEO (rather than GEO) space elevator.  While I’m a writer of fiction, and certainly hope that such scenarios never come to pass, I do hope that my book might contribute in some small way to the growing publicity around space elevators, which I firmly believe to be an idea whose time has come…

You might also check out my website, where I’ve got a fair amount of imagery/data relating to the Elevator, and the world of 2110.”

The website is splendid and well worth a visit – the trailer he’s posted is first-rate and ranks very high on my cool-o-meter…  And as a blogger, I especially enjoy David’s blog – it’s really well done.

Once I’ve read this book, I’ll post a review here on the blog.

(Click on the cover thumbnail to see a larger version)

Update – 28JUN08 – Tim Gebhart has published a review of this book here.

Brian Turner of the Kansas City Space Pirates pointed out a very interesting article to me, an article discussing the latest success from Boeing with their battlefield laser weapon system they are developing.  From the article:

Boeing Fires New Thin-Disk Laser, Achieving Solid-State Laser Milestone

ST. LOUIS, June 03, 2008 — The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] fired its new thin-disk laser system repeatedly in recent tests, achieving the highest known simultaneous power, beam quality and run time for any solid-state laser to date.

In each laser firing at Boeing’s facility in West Hills, Calif., the high-energy laser achieved power levels of over 25 kilowatts for multi-second durations, with a measured beam quality suitable for a tactical weapon system. The Boeing laser integrates multiple thin-disk lasers into a single system. Through these successful tests, the Boeing team has proven the concept of scalability to a 100-kilowatt-class system based on the same architecture and technology.

The system they tested, as noted is ~25 kW of power.  For reference, the system which TRUMPF is supplying to 5 contestants in this year’s Space Elevator games is 8 kW, or about 1/3 the power.  It is no wonder that safety is such a concern in this year’s games (as it was last year, too).

As another point of reference, in the Edwards-Westling book, ‘The Space Elevator’, the authors state that a 2.4MW laser will be needed to power a 20 ton climber.  So a single 25kW unit now being demonstrated by Boeing is only 1% of the way there (though the 100kW future unit discussed in the article would supply about 4% of the power needed for a 20 ton Climber).

Chemical lasers, by comparison, can be found in the MW range and it was my assumption that these are the lasers being targeted for use in a future space elevator.  I emailed Dr. Brad Edwards to check my assumptions about this new solid-state laser and he replied:

“This is the laser I was talking to them about a few years ago. At that time they said it was basically a matter of money. But if they have the 100kW laser as they state ‘in the coming years’ then that means we need to purchase 24 of these and point them all at the climber (through a large mirror or set of mirrors. Their size and how they run would make this pretty straight forward and the plan I have had in mind for some time. This is actually pretty promising.”

Surprised, I asked him specifically about the preferability, if any, of this solid-state laser over the chemical ones.  He replied:

“The solid-state ones are more efficient, much easier to use, much smaller and less costly in the end – I like them much better. Yes, having multiple small lasers is better from a redundancy aspect though it can be more challenging in operations – best is to have a small number but enough that if a few fail you can still run.”

So, this new laser development IS a very promising one and is yet one more ‘brick in the road’ (or should I use the analogy ‘fiber in the tether’? 🙂 ) on the way to a Space Elevator…

I forgot to mention that Simon Vanden Bussche, emailing me from Belgium, was the first one to correctly guess what ‘work in progress’ (documented here, here, here and here) was.  Simon has previously contributed to this blog (via providing the Dutch translation for ‘Space Elevator’) and has also written an article about the first Space Elevator Conference held in Europe last year (chronicled here).  Thank you Simon!

The picture, above, is a thumbnail of a poster which was mounted on the Space Elevator Games Venue exhibit.  It contain’s Ben Shelef’s thoughts on the value of asteroids to humanity.  Click on the thumbnail to get a larger, readable version of the picture.

We’re up to 23!  Dan Leafblad from the Kansas City Space Pirates has sent me translations for ‘Space Elevator’ in six additional languages, Finnish, Korean, Romanian, Hindi, Czech and Greek.  Thanks Dan!

And last but not least, Tom Nugent (and his wife Elizabeth – I do think she had something to do with this), of LiftPort and LaserMotive fame, welcomed the latest addition to their family, Howard Antares Nugent.  If you want to see all the details about ‘fun and games’ with their new baby, check out Not In Kansas Anymore…  Congratulations guys!!

I enjoyed attending this year’s ISDC conference, but I must say that I was faintly disappointed by it.  The attendance was not huge.  I don’t know what the official numbers are, but I would be very surprised if there were more than 500 people in attendance – somehow I expected more because ISDC is supposed to be the ‘big’ Space conference.  The second thing I was disappointed in was the heavy emphasis on SPS (Solar Power Satellites).  As I’ve written before, I think that anyone who believes that SPS will EVER generate a significant portion of earth’s power needs just hasn’t run the numbers.  Almost all of the SPS presentations I attended never addressed that issue.  Now I didn’t attend all of the SPS presentations so perhaps there were some I missed which tried to inject a dose of reality into this discussion, but somehow I don’t think so.  Ben Shelef, in one of the final presentations, did say just that and no one contradicted him.  I don’t think anyone can.

The military was there as an enthusiastic fan of SPS.  For them, perhaps, and for other applications which require high-availability and (relatively) low amounts of power (and where cost is not a factor), SPS (via lasers, not microwaves) can make some sense.  But for you and me, powering our computers and electric cars and refrigerators?  NFW…

I know that the National Space Society (NSS) has made SPS one of their signature issues.  At the conference, I was able to meet Bert Murray (head of the NSS Space Elevator team) and I am going to try and start a dialog with NSS about this issue (using Bert as a conduit).  Perhaps they can prove me wrong.  I would certainly love it if they did, but I’m not holding my breath…

Just a couple of pictures to wrap things up then – the first one, above, is, from left to right, Brian Turner of the Kansas City Space Pirates, Lt. Col. Peter Damphousse of the United States Air Force and Jim Dempsey.  Lt. Col Damphousse was part of several panels/presentations about SPS.

The second picture is of the Meteor Crater Exhibit, put together by Ben Shelef (pictured) of the Spaceward Association, broken down and packed into it’s shipping container.  It seemed like an appropriate “end” photo…

Next up is the 2008 Space Elevator Conference (July 18th-20th).  Only 45 more days…

(As always, click on the thumbnails for a larger version of the picture)

I wondered why my traffic had spiked in the last couple of days – a mention from Glenn Reynolds / Instapundit will do that… 🙂

Welcome to the Space Elevator Blog!  Here I try and keep everyone up-to-date with all things Space Elevator related – I’m glad you stopped by.

In case you’re wondering, the Space Elevator is NOT a loony idea.  The physics are sound and the benefits of a Space Elevator, cheap and reliable access to space for huge quantities of just about anything you care to ship up there, are staggering.  Yes, the engineering challenges are formidable and the key ingredient, carbon nanotubes of sufficient strength and in sufficient number are not yet available.  But that’s what Engineers do with engineering challenges, they solve them.

The state of the art in engineering carbon nanotubes is advancing by leaps and bounds.  People I know and trust believe that carbon nanotube fibers with the quality needed to create a Space Elevator will be available in the next few years.

In addition to the engineering challenges, there will be legal issues, political issues and, of course, business issues to be addressed.  But where there are huge benefits and huge profits to be made (both possible with the Space Elevator), these issues can be overcome.  Stay tuned…

If the idea of the Space Elevator intrigues you, I urge you to put this blog into your RSS feed.  Two other sites which you should also check out are the Spaceward site (the home of the Space Elevator Games) and the Space Elevator Reference.

You might also want to consider attending the annual Space Elevator conference, sponsored this year by Microsoft, Black Line Ascension and Industrial Nano, being held at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, from July 18th through July 20th.

Finally, let me make you aware of the Space Elevator Games.  This is a 5 year challenge, sponsored with 4 million dollars of money from NASA.  There are two competitions, one in power-beaming and one in creating strong tethers.  Both of these technologies will be absolutely essential to build a space elevator and the Spaceward Foundation has partnered with NASA to promote these technologies/competitions.  This year is the fourth year of the challenge.  If you are interested in learning more about this, visit the Spaceward Foundation website.  If you’d like to see what happened at the games last year or the prior year, just do a search on this blog for 2007 Space Elevator Games or 2006 Space Elevator Games.

And thanks for reading…

Today was the last full day of this year’s ISDC conference and also a day which saw the two sessions devoted to the idea of a Space Elevator.

The first session today was presented by independent researcher Jim Dempsey and was entitled Space Elevator Initial Deployment.  Jim is not convinced that the tether deploymen proposed by Brad Edwards (i.e., placing an initial ribbon carrying a climber at Geo and then spooling the ribbon down to earth) will work, mainly due to ribbon fluctuations.  He’s proposed an alternative, deploying many tether fibers individually down to earth and then, when a sufficient number of them are in place, sending a climber up the ‘bundle’, combining them into a tether as it goes.  He has an Internet-reachable presentation which I’m unable to find at the moment – I”ll link to it when I can find it.

Incidentally, I’ve mentioned Jim in a couple of previous posts (here, where he related a very prescient observation from Sir Isaac Newton, and here, where he weighs in on the paper by Nicolas Pugno) and he will be presenting at this year’s Space Elevator Conference.

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Next up was a joint presentation by Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation and Bert Murray of the National Space Society (NSS) Space Elevator Team.  Ben went first and gave an overview of the Space Elevator Games, discussing how/why they were founded, their history and their current status.

Bert then took the stage and gave an interesting presentation of what the NSS team is planning to do.  The prize money for theClimber/Power-Beaming competition is being awarded in two different levels; $900,000 for a single winner with valid climb of 2m/s and $2,000,000 for a single winner with a valid climb of 5m/s.  The NSS team is going for the whole $2,000,000.

Finally, we have a photo of the “concept” climber built by the NSS Space Elevator team.  It is the one they used in the BBC documentary I blogged about here.  It is a small unit (for reference, I placed a quarter on the table just in front of it), but appears very rugged and efficient.  And, obviously it worked…

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I’ll do a wrap-up post tomorrow or Monday.

(As always, click on the thumbnails for a larger version of the picture)

Here are a few more photos taken at today’s ISDC2008 conference.

This first one is of a young lady walking around ISDC2008 in a concept design for a new-style spacesuit.  It is supposed to be much more flexible and efficient then ones being used today.  She told me the name of the company was “StarSuits”, but that they don’t yet have a website.  You heard it here first…

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This second picture is of (from left to right) Ben Shelef, Brian Turner and Ray Dittmeier.  Ray is the author of the Space Prizes Blog, a blog dedicated to all things Space Prizes related.  He and I have emailed each other a few times in the past and he has always had nice things to say about my blog so it was a real (and unexpected!) pleasure to meet him today.  His blog is very succinct and is the place to go if you want to follow events in all of the various Space Prize competitions being held.

The National Space Society (NSS) Climber team is selling raffle tickets for a Quilt.  I’m told that this is not just any quilt, but one that normally sells for thousands and thousands of dollars.  This picture is a closeup of the tickets.  Well, I thought they were interesting…

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Finally, this photo shows the shipping box for the Meteor Crater exhibit.  It’s laying on its side and, sizewise, is quite impressive.  My guess is about 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide and 4 feet deep.  I’m sure the shipping company was thrilled when they saw this…  It looks very sturdy and should keep this exhibit well protected.

Tomorrow, we finally get to the two Space Elevator presentations which are scheduled.  The first is by Jim Dempsey, an entrepreneur who has come up with an alternative way of deploying a Space Elevator tether.  The second presentation will be by Bert Murray of the NSS team, giving us a status report of his team’s climber.  He’s also promised to bring the “proof of concept” model used in the BBC footage I blogged about last month.

Stay tuned…

(Click on the thumbnails for a larger version of the picture)

How many engineers does it take to replace a balloon?  The video, below, explores this complicated issue…

It seems that the balloon used in the Space Elevator Games venue mockup was leaking and losing some of it’s lift, so it had to be replaced.  In this video, we see Ben Shelef, founder of Spaceward and the creator of this exhibit doing just that.  First he had to untie one of the four tethers so that he could pull the ‘current’ balloon over close enough to him so he could work with it.  Then we see him replace the balloon with the new one and then have it returned to its original position.  He was ably assisted by Brian Turner and Ravi of the Kansas City Space Pirates.

All in all, a competent job 🙂

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrOlT9cGJ50[/youtube]

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Some things I learned (or relearned) about balloons and tethers today:

This balloon is filled with Helium, a monatomic (single atom) molecule.  This means that it will leak more than a balloon filed with Hydrogen, a diatomic (two-atom) molecule.  I may have learned this in High School, but probably not…

You’ll note that there are four tethers holding up the balloon.  Four was used, rather than three, for a very specific reason.  If you have four tethers and one of them snaps, this will not put any additional force on the tether/rope in the middle, the one being used for the racetrack.  However, if you have only three tethers and one of them snaps, then additional force can be put on the ‘racetrack’ tether, possibly causing it to snap.  And if a climber happens to be on it at the time, well, look out below…

Well, here I am at ISDC2008.  Lots of people, lots of cool space things and a mockup of a possible Space Elevator competition site!

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This first picture is of Ben Shelef, fearless leader of the Spaceward Foundation, along with an interested visitor to the Spaceward Exhibition (Ben is the good-looking guy on the left).  The exhibit is a mockup of what it might look like at the 2008 Space Elevator Games IF Meteor Crater in Arizona is chosen as the venue.  While the crater is to scale, of course the Lego climber on the “tether” and the balloon are not – the balloon should be about the size of a golf ball.  And this exhibit, of course, is the answer to the “Under construction” riddle I’ve posted over the past several days.  Ben will have a more extensive posting of his “progress pictures” on the Spaceward website in the next several days.

This picture is a closeup of the “crater”.  The ‘sand effect’ was created with, oddly enough, real sand.

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Here is a picture of the background Spaceward Display.  You can see several translations of the term “Space Elevator” on the display.  It’s nice to know that someone is getting some use out of my Translation Project….

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And finally, we have a closeup of Ben – this to show a certain family member that he really can wear a suit, even though it goes against everything an Engineer stands for.

The exhibit/display/mockup is really quite awesome – Ben did a great job on this and it has generated a lot of interest.  Lots of people were attracted to it and this, of course, helps get the word out.

More later, including some video I’m taking…

(As always, click on the thumbnails for a larger version of the picture)

A better version of the Phoenix probe landing on Mars has been released.  It is incredible – no other word comes close.

Read here for an explanation.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size picture.

If you visit the 2008 Space Elevator Conference website and login, you will see the preliminary schedule for this upcoming conference.

Topics include:

• Why We Need an Elevator to Space!
• Thin Disc lasers – a robust, scalable source for power beaming applications
• The Space Elevator: Solution to Global Climate Control
• Space Elevator Dynamics through Simple Approximations
• Technology of Japan that can be utilized for construction of an SE
• Superconducting Electromagnetic Applications for a Space Elevator

And many, many more…

Speakers include Dr. Bradley Edwards, Bryan Laubscher, Dr. Jerome Peterson, Peter Swan, Blaise Gassend, Markus Klettner, Akira Tsuchida, Holger Schlueter, etc., etc., etc…

If you haven’t signed up for this event, I urge you to do so now – it promises to be everything that a hard-core Space Elevator junkie could want.

And it should be a lot of fun too – only 56 more days!

(Correction: 23May08 – oops, I meant Jerome PEARSON of course, not Peterson.  Thanks Michael…)

I found this video on YouTube a couple of days ago:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_v9BgU16Y4[/youtube]

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I found it quite interesting, but had no idea in what context it was built.  I contacted the person who uploaded this video to YouTube and asked them what it was all about.  ‘Caitlin2022’ replied:

“Just a group of students from the University of New South Wales, we had a project to build a scaled down version of the elevator to climb a 7m tether.”

Here’s hoping we see an Aussie team in the Space Elevator competition someday…

And yes, the video is ‘sideways’.  It would have been more appropriate had it been upside down 🙂

If you go to the Google website today, you’ll see that their logo has been altered to look as it has been created by various colored laser-beams, this to honor the first succesful demonstration of a laser, 48 years ago today.

I checked both the TRUMPF and DILAS websites, but neither one of them mentioned it – perhaps they’re waiting for the 50th anniversary in 2010 🙂

(Hat tip to Dan Leafblad of the Kansas City Space Pirates for this info – thanks Dan!)

THE original Space Elevator site, Marc Boucher’s Space Elevator Reference, is undergoing a renovation.  In addition to a spiffy new logo, we learn that;

“…the site will be changing it’s current format which is more news oriented with some reference material to a wiki/mashup platform allowing for greater participation and dissemination of reference material. I anticipate having the site online before the upcoming Space Elevator Conference. So at this time I’m asking for volunteers to step forward in helping create the new Space Elevator Reference.”

Read the entire post to see what’s happening at this site…

I like the new logo Marc!

I don’t like to write about the same thing twice, especially in the same week.  However, this is just too cool not to…

On Friday, May 2nd, Brian Turner, Captain and Fearless Leader of the Kansas City Space Pirates is scheduled to appear on the Conan O’Brien show (11:30pm Central – I don’t know what time in other time zones – look it up).

Oh, God of TIVO, please let my recording of this show be without troubles.  If you grant me this boon, I will promise to worship you forever and ever…

(Thumbnail from here – click on it for a larger version)

Dr. Brad Edwards, the ‘father’ of the modern-day conception of the Space Elevator, has written a very interesting article in the latest issue of the TRUMPF newsletter (available here).

In this article, Dr. Edwards talks about how lasers can be used, not only to power the Climbers that will travel on the Space Elevator, but also may be involved in the creation of the carbon nanotube fibers that the Elevator will be built of.  From the article:

“A powerful laser is focused onto a mixture of carbon and metal catalysts vaporizing the mixture into the surrounding 1200 °C furnace. The metal catalyst forms nanoparticles where the carbon atoms adhere and move about to combine into rings and then graphite sheets. These sheets wrap around the catalyst particle and form a tube that begins to extend out as more carbon atoms are added to the end where the catalyst sits.”

A truly interesting article – highly recommended.

TRUMPF, of course, is the company which is providing laser power and laser-power-expertise to no less than five of the contestants in this year’s Space Elevator Games (chronicled here, here, here, here and here).

(Hat tip to Dan Leafblad of the Kansas City Space Pirates for pointing out this article to me – thanks Dan!)

Akira Tsuchida, Captain and Fearless Leader of Team E-T-C, emailed me to let me know that the book by Brad Edwards and Philip Ragan, Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator, has now been translated into Japanese and is available at Japanese book stores.

The translation of its title into Japanese results in ??????????? (The Space Travel by the Elevator).

Akira has also told me that this book has been placed in a position of prominence in the bookstores; with multiple copies being placed on a cart at the front of the store.

And, for those of you who would rather order it online, it’s available at Amazon.com.

(Click on the book cover thumbnail for a larger version)