We’re all here and more or less awake. Several sessions have already been completed. I just finished listening to Karen Ghazaryan presenting on “Dynamics of a compound elastic cable for the Space Elevator“. Karen came here all the way from Armenia to present his paper. His paper sparked a lot of interest and a lot of questions – the most so far.
Now I’m listening to Ben Shelef present his paper “The Space Elevator Feasibility Condition“. I’ve written before that I think this is one of the most important papers released in the Space Elevator field in the last year or two and anyone who wants to see how strong a tether has to be and how realistic a Space Elevator is needs to understand this document. Ben’s pessimistic (but not totally gloomy) viewpoint is sure to spark a lot of questions afterwards too.
Good stuff so far today and I expect it to continue.
One note on the Strong Tether competition; there is only going to be one competitor this year, and yes, they have brought a carbon nanotube tether. It’s a new team, from Japan, from Shizuoka University. It will be very interesting to see what they have brought. Unfortunately (very unfortunately) the MIT/DeltaX team which competed in the last Tether competition will not be here this year. But we still will have a competition – the Japanese tether against the house tether.
Stay tuned!
Will the presented papers be available on line?
I’m told that it will be available, but I don’t know the format. Details will be on the Conference website.
Sorry I don’t have a more definitive answer, but that’s what I have at the moment.