Daily Archives: October 15, 2007

2007 Space Elevator Games – (Entry 13)

The picture is a closeup of a portion of the USST climber.  The two tubes on either side, I am told, are to carry payload.  In addition to having to climb 2 meters / second in order to qualify for prize money, the amount of payload being carried on a qualifying run is one of the elements in the formula to determine the winner.  Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the picture.

Here are a couple of USST-related videos taken today.

The first is their climber (minus the collectors).  The USST Team members in the video told me that this is the real climber, not a mock-up or backup.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Uxp6LAwC4[/youtube]

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This second video is of two USST team members preparing some water to be used in cooling their laser.  They are filtering and de-ionizing ordinary tap water to suit their purpose.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R61hIEO1h2w[/youtube]

2007 Space Elevator Games – (Entry 12)

Here is a photo (not very good quality, sorry, I took it from the video) and two videos of today’s qualifying runs for the Kansas City Space Pirates.  They actually did three runs in all.  I bumped into the YouTube limit of 100MB per file.  My file was 288MB so I had to cut out the two qualifying runs and upload them separately.  Anyway, here they are.

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

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KT1cKmbNfQ[/youtube]

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As always, click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the picture.

2007 Space Elevator Games – (Entry 11)

Problems for the McGill Space Elevator team.  It seems that they had an accident on the way to the Fairgrounds.  From the photo, it looks like they took a turn too fast and the truck tipped over.  I’m told, however, that something went wrong with one of their wheels and they got hit by a tractor-trailer.  I’m not sure if that is true – I’ll have to wait to talk to them to get the straight skinny.

I received two emails from Cyrus.  The first (accompanied by the picture) reads as follows:

FYI, our wrecked trailer. At least no one was hurt.
We’ll be in Farmington soon!

That’s good news.  Equipment can be replaced, people cannot.  The second email reads as follows:

Ted,I see you’ve renamed us McGillworks. We actually have our own
white-light beam powered system we’re going to attempt first, so we’re
indeed ‘McGill Space Elevator Team’!
See you this morning.Cyrus

So it looks like we’ll see them on Tuesday morning.  Hopefully their equipment was undamaged, or at least repairable…

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the picture.

2007 Space Elevator Games – (Entry 9)

So, it’s Monday, October 15th and another beautiful day here at the site of the 2007 Space Elevator Games.

The latest developmen is that the LaserMotive team and equipment have arrived.  Tom Nugent, Project Manager for LaserMotive, told me he was here yesterday – I guess I missed him.  But their equipment arrived about an hour ago.  I’ll be posting on that later.

We now have 5 teams on site; USST, KC Space Pirates, E-T-C, UBC Snowstar and now LaserMotive.  3 more to go…

In the meantime, here is a video clip showing the Kansas City Space Pirates getting ready for a qualifying run.  As everything has to be set up for this, it will probably take some hours to get it ready to go.  Future qualification runs should go quicker.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLWzF2SP49U[/youtube]