Markus Klettner, Executive Director of EuroSpaceward, has kindly sent me several documents resulting from or relating to the recent EuroSpaceward Conference.

This first document is an interview of Markus by BBC New Journalist Jason Palmer.  Markus hastens to add that the views he expresses in this interview are his own and are not necessarily representative of EuroSpaceward.  This document is in pdf format.

The next document is the Conference presentation by Professor Nicola Pugno entitled “The role of defects in the design of Space Elevator cable” and is in Microsoft Powerpoint format.

Finally, Markus has kindly provided us with 8 other documents/presentations authored or co-authored by the same Professor Pugno relating to his studies of defects in carbon nanotubes.  All of these documents are in pdf format.

• “Space Elevator: Out of Order?”
• “The role of defects in the design of space elevator cable: From nanotube to megatube”
• “Are scaling laws on strength of solids related to mechanics or to geometry?”
• “On the strength of the carbon nanotube-based space elevator cable: from nanomechanics to megamechanics”
• “Multiscale Stochastic Simulations for Tensile Testing of Nanotube-Based Macroscopic Cables”
• “On the stability of the track of the space elevator”
• “Super-bridges suspended over carbon nanotube cables”
• “The strongest matter: ‘Einsteinon’ could be one billion times stronger than carbon nanotubes”

So, if you need some reading material – here it is!

These documents are particularly relevant as I have recently presented a series of posts (here, here and here) on Ben Shelef’s (CEO of Spaceward) view of how strong a carbon nanotube ribbon has to be to make a useful Space Elevator.  From my own reading of Prof. Pugno’s papers, it appears that there are some differences of opinion (or at least differences in the way things are stated) between Prof. Pugno and Ben on this issue.  Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, ISEC can explore these differences in more detail.