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.

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…

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…

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.

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)

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…

In this newsletter, LiftPort announces that they are creating an “open-source”, wiki-based project to let the Space Elevator community help LiftPort (or someone) “build” a Space Elevator.

You can read the newsletter here.

At the Space Elevator Reference, Dr. Brad Edwards announces;

“EuroSpaceward was just awarded funding by The National Research Fund of Luxembourg to hold a workshop on space elevator climber and tether design primarily focusing on systems for entry in the US and German competitions. The tentative dates are Nov. 14-16, 2007 and the workshop will be held in a yet to be announced venue in Luxembourg.”

This is very cool and is yet another sign that the Europeans are getting serious about this idea.  Read Dr. Edward’s full post here.

An undated but recent (I think) short article from Softpedia on the Space Elevator…

(Update 29MAY2007 – Comments from both Michael Laine and Brian Dunbar indicate that this is an old article, not a new one.  As I’ve written before on other posts, Search Engines are weird things…)

(Update 30MAY2007 – And, yes it is a NEW article.  See the comments thread below.  My apologies to my search engine 🙂 )

For me, the “killer app” of Space Elevator Development has always been the economically viable deployment of Solar Power Satellites.  It promises unlimited, clean energy from the sun, captured by SPS and beamed to earth-based rectennas and from there, channeled into the earth’s power grids.  The problem has always been, as I understood it, getting these SPS into orbit cheaply enough so they could be economically viable, and this is still true.

But there’s a BIG difference between making SPS a commercially viable enterprise and making SPS able to generate the lion’s share of earth’s energy usage.  In my naiveté, I had hoped they would be one in the same, that we could replace most or all of our polluting energy sources with SPS.  Sadly, unless my calculations are way wrong, this turns out to be not the case.

Here’s the basic numbers (I’ll explain where I got them later on in the posting):

• The performance numbers of SPS are projected to be on the order of 2kg/kW (Henson / URSI / Wikipedia)
• A 200T ribbon (140T payload) can handle 125 trips per year (Edwards-Westling)
• This equals a lift capacity of 17,500T per year, per ribbon
• This equals ~8.75 GW per year, per ribbon
• Planet-wide energy usage is project to increase ~.5TW per year (EIA)
• This means it will take ~60 of these ribbons to handle just the INCREASE in planet-wide energy usage, not making a dent at all in currently generated power

I hope my numbers are wrong because they mean that, unless SPS efficiency can be increased by at least an order of magnitude (or two), a SE-SPS solution may be commercially viable, but will not seriously decrease the release of CO2 and other pollutants into our atmosphere.

Another interesting number I came up with is that a space-based solar power array sufficient to power the planet in the year 2030 would be approximately equal in area to the country of India and the rectennas would need to be approximately equal in area to the country of Italy.  Well, I thought it was interesting…

I invite everyone to try and prove my numbers wrong – I’ll be very happy if you can show that I’ve overstated the problem somewhere…

Where did I get my numbers?

I got the SPS performance number from a presentation by Keith Henson.  This presentation (PowerPoint format here, pdf format here) is quite interesting.  He presents the 2kg/kW number as an aside; his proposal is for a “direct drive” Space Elevator (as opposed to the Edwards-Westling “laser-drive” version).  I went to a couple of other sources to try and verify his number.  Wikipedia gives a range of .5kg – 10kg per kW.  A White paper by the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) gives a number of 1kg/kW for their proposal.  So 2kg/kW seemed reasonable to me.  Incidentally, I had blogged about his “direct-drive” proposal earlier, here.

The 140T / 125 trips per year number comes directly from the Edwards-Westling book, The Space Elevator.

The projected, yearly, planet-wide energy increase comes from the US Governments Energy Information Administration website.  This website contains all sort of fascinating information and I had a lot of fun poking around in it.

This information, in part, led me to the conclusion that only the profit-motive is strong enough to drive the development of the Space Elevator, not the ability to solve our global energy and/or pollution problems.  I presented this at the recently completed SESI conference and blogged about it here.

One final note; Keith Henson was recently interviewed by RUSirius.  You can find the podcast here.  It’s a long podcast; they actually begin talking about at 10:03 into it.  I strongly recommend you review Keith’s proposal before you listen to this rather rambling podcast – otherwise it may not make much sense to you.

(The picture is from www.abo.fi – click on it for a larger version)

At this year’s ISDC conference, Jerome Pearson, one of the “fathers” of the modern Space Elevator concept, is scheduled to speak on Saturday, May 26th.  The title of his presentation is “Space Elevators for Earth & Moon”.

A website detailing some of Mr. Pearson’s accomplishments is here.

(Photo credit; Wade Spees for the Washington Post – click on it for a larger image)

From the May, 2007 Newsletter;

Michael Laine, President of LiftPort Group, has set a hard date by which we must turn this company profitable. We must produce 25k/month in revenue by September 1st or we will be dissolving the corporation. It’s possible. We have tons of books and other retail items yet to be sold, we have the Tethered Towers balloon product, we have great speakers, we even have a non-working nanotube furnace on the other side of the country that needs a lift. Some of these could produce that revenue on their own; several of them together should be able to do it.

You can read the entire newsletter here.

Here is a book review of an effort that sounds interesting and amusing.  According to the review, Space Elevators are mentioned in this book, but I have no idea how much or how seriously.  Still, if someone is looking for reading material, this may fill the bill.  Available at Amazon.com (and probably other places as well)…

Another review of the book, complete with an interview with the author, can be found here.

(Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the Book Cover)

There is now a YouTube channel comprised solely of videos from the LiftPort crew.  These videos show various types of testing they’ve done with their prototypes.

There are 8 videos on there now and more are promised in the near future.

I’ve linked to one of the videos here.  Visit the channel to view the entire collection…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ElevatorToSpace[/youtube]

This coming Sunday, May 20th, the CBS Sunday Morning show is scheduled to air a segment on the Space Elevator.  The reporter researching the show, Mary Lou Teel, has been in touch with several sources (including yours truly), so I’m hopeful that we’ll have a serious, thoughtful treatment of the subject.

You’ll need to check your local listings for what time the show will air in your area.  In the Central Time Zone, it is 8:00am.

I’ll have my TIVO running…

In the meantime, here is a story from 2003 that CBS did on the Space Elevator.

On the MAST blog, they’re reporting that have seen mixed results so far.  While they’ve been able to contact “Gadget” and download a lot of data from it, they’ve had only very limited success in actually deploying the tether.  From the blog;

“Based upon the data we have, we have concluded that Ted did separate from Gadget and begin to deploy the tether. However, a problem with the restraint system prevented Ted from ejecting smoothly, and as a result Ted was pushed away with too little momentum to continue pulling the tether off of the deployer spool. As a result, the deployment halted almost immediately. Our analysis of the magnetometer data we have downloaded from Gadget reveals that the tethered system is rotating slowly, but the length of tether connecting the two bodies is very short. At this point, we believe there is not enough energy in the rotation to pull more tether off of the spool. This is certainly disappointing, as it means that obtaining data on tether survivability may not be possible, but nonetheless we are obtaining interesting data that will be useful in validating models of the behavior of tethered spacecraft.”

This is disappointing, of course, for the Space Elevator community; being able to successfully unspool the Space Elevator ribbon in space will be a necessary requirement for its deployment and it would have been truly wonderful to get some data on how tethers surive in space.  Nevertheless, the fact that they were able to successfully launch this experiment and have some success with it should go a long way towards having an even more successful experiment the next time around.  Congratulations here are certainly richly deserved…

Read the whole post here.

Peter and Cathy Swan have just released a new book which should be of great interest to the Space Elevator community.  It’s entitled “Space Elevator Systems Architecture” and should satisfy the “geekiness” in all of us hard-core SE aficiandos…

A description of the book, from Peter and Cathy;

“Space Elevator Systems Architecture gives a new look at a futuristic SPACE ELEVATOR project from a Systems Architecture perspective.  This system of systems is a … “revolutionary way of getting from Earth into space, a ribbon with one end attached to Earth on a floating platform located at the equator and the other end in space beyond geosynchronous orbit.  A Space Elevator will ferry satellites, spaceships, and pieces of space stations into space using electric lifts clamped to the ribbon, serving as a means for commerce, scientific advancement, and exploration.”  The purpose of this book is to make the Space Elevator’s arena a little easier to understand, through the use of Space Systems Architecture; and, is directed toward decision makers, engineering managers, regulators, financiers, engineers, and technicians.  This book lays out the initial “top level” view of a Space Elevator through a Space Systems Architecture approach for space mega-projects in both an academic and a practical manner illustrating steps, tradeoffs, and complexities.”

Once I’ve read this book, I’ll be posting a review of it.  Get your copy from Amazon.com today!

(Click on the picture of the book’s cover to see a larger version)

In February, I had blogged about a new microdosimeter being developed by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.  A few days ago, I received their latest newsletter.  In it there was a story about how it had been launched in March of this year as part of a multi-experiment payload aboard MidSTAR-1.

From their newsletter: “The goal of the MIDN (microdosimeter instrument) project is to develop a rugged, portable, lightweight radiation detection instrument that will measure the three forms of space radiation – solar flares, trapped particle radiation and galactic cosmic rays. When fully developed, the instrument will enable real-time measurement of radiation risk in space and risk of damage to body tissue.”

This device or one similar to it is going to be required, I’m sure, on all Space Elevator payloads, especially human ones, to ensure that the shielding is working properly. 

You can go here to read the newsletter with the rest of the story.  (Bob Munck alert – it’s a .pdf file)

About a month ago, stories were circulating that NASA was getting ready to close down NIAC, a decision which many of us found to be incomprehensible.  I blogged about this story earlier as did many others.

Via Andy Price, I’ve become aware of an effort within NIAC to try and save the agency.  They have asked that people who can help them demonstrate benefits of NIAC funding in the past, contact NIAC with this information.  Specifically, they are looking for a demonstrated ROI in areas such as;

1) Subsequent investment by NASA, other government agencies, or the private sector.
2) Intellectual contributions that have resulted in an agency putting resources into its own studies of a concept. For example, prompted by the success of a Phase I or Phase II concept, an agency convenes panels to study the work, includes it in a decadal plan, or otherwise funds studies of its own.
3) Unexpected spin-off technologies. For example, some NIAC studies have resulted in new medical technologies.
4) The production of technical PhD and Master’s level students.
5) The production of new jobs.
6) Enhancement of public understanding of agency missions (for most of you, this would be beneficial PR for NASA, or NRO, or DARPA).

For us in the Space Elevator community, the results of NIAC funding have been nothing short of revolutionary; before their funding of Dr. Bradley Edward’s research, an SE was strictly a Science-Fiction concept only.  Now it’s something that is an actual possibility.  The Space Elevator project is gaining public momentum and acceptance, to the point of being the subject of conferences, in museum exhibits, on TV shows and in Space Elevator games (both for “adults” – ie. chasing after real prize money and for kids, in the Robotic games).  To me, this is what “blue-sky” funding is all about; taking a concept which is totally revolutionary and finding a way whereby it can actually happen.

At least that’s something along the lines of what I’m going to say in my letter (email, actually) to NIAC.

Here’s another article about NIAC, this from Wired.com in 2004.

Further words from Brad Edwards on the potential defunding of this program; “My general thoughts are that this is a very poor decision on NASA’s part. NIAC has demonstrated that it can produce results on a small budget unlike other components of NASA proper.  Cutting NIAC is easy simply because it is an external contract.  NASA would be better served by taking the more difficult road and trimming the non-productive components inside the centers and funding development of new technologies that can save time and money while reducing risk and producing better results in the long-run.  NIAC and programs like it, if utilized, can provide the tools to define NASA roadmaps and programs that have low risk and produce the results needed to succeed.”

If you want to offer some words to NIAC, send them to Diana Jennings (djennings [AT] niac.usra.edu).  Dr Edwards says to send “Specific results, work, ROI are best but stated support can’t hurt.”

Amen to that.  Let’s let ’em know that what they do matters…

Mixed (but mostly positive) results for the MAST mission so far.  Still no contact with Ted (Hey!  I’m here 🙂 ), but they continue to have good contact with Gadget.  I can’t tell for sure from their blog, but it looks like they think the tether is deployed, but need verification of this.  Consequently, if you have a telescope and clear skies, they would love to have you take a look and report to them what you see.

You can go to heavens-above and get the coordinates for their satellite (it’s object 31126 in their database).  On the MAST site, they also have a cool map showing where the satellite is at the moment.  Just a few minutes ago, it came fairly close to passing overhead of the Chicago area.  If these &(^%)&^$U# clouds would ever clear, I might be able to spot it.

A couple of years ago, I bought my son a Meade ETX-80 for his birthday.  It has go-to capability so, theoretically, we should just be able to update the coordinate database and find MAST.  But, we’ve had nothing but rain and clouds here for the past few days.  This weekend it is supposed to clear up and then maybe I can get a look.  I think it would be an awesome sight…

In a recent posting on TechTakeaway.com, the author claims that “Transporting goods from earth to the moon and back has caused problems to efforts colonize the Moon, Russia plans to solve this with an ambitious space elevator project.”  They accompany this short article with an artists conception picture of an earth-based space elevator.

Frankly, I don’t think so, and have contacted the authors for more information.

Their source may be the two articles I had blogged about earlier (here and here), but the Space Elevators discussed in those two articles were based in outer space, in both lunar and earth orbit.

But I’d love to be wrong.  Maybe we’ll finally have a “Tsar-way to Heaven” after all (apologies to Led Zeppelin)…

(01MAY2007 Update – I heard back from the editors and yes, indeed, they did get their story from the articles I mentioned.  I sent an email back to them, letting them know of the miscommunication.)

No, this has nothing to do (directly) with a Space Elevator. But for all of us who look up at the night sky and wonder, this is incredibly exciting news…

There are several stories and analyses of this, but the best one (IMHO, of course) is this one at the Planetary Society.

(Drawing courtesy of ESO – click on it for a larger version)

The tether experiment currently being run by Tethers Unlimited is off to a good start. For those of you unfamiliar with the experiment, three picosatellites have been launched for the purpose of deploying a HoyTether and monitoring it’s “health” while in space’s hostile environment.

The base picosatellite (“Gadget”) has been successfully contacted via radio. The deployment picosatellite (“Ted” – hey, what a great name! 🙂 ) has, so far, not made successful radio contact with ground control. However, the third picosatellite (“Ralph”), the one which will be traveling along the tether, photographing and monitoring its health, has sent back a preliminary picture of a portion of the tether – prior to deployment.

Though this tether is certainly not a Space Elevator, the relevance of this experiment towards the eventual deployment of a Space Elevator is obvious; How will this tether survive in space? How successful will the robots be in deploying it? How successful will the robot be in traveling along, monitoring and photographing the tether? If this monitoring robot had repair capabilities (on the drawing board for the next experiment, I’m sure), then it would be even more relevant.

Check out the MAST blog to keep up-to-date with the rapid pace of events of this experiment. I can’t wait to see (and perhaps take) a picture of the fully deployed tether.

Michael Laine spoke at the “Conference on World Affairs” in Boulder, Colorado, last Tuesday…

This is good news.  Guess I’m going to have to get the telescope out and see if I can spot it – would make for some very cool pictures, I’m sure.

Way to go Rob (and company)!

Check out their blog to keep up to date…