Over at the official site of the Space Elevator Games, Ben Shelef (aka the CrazyEddieBlogger) has put up a couple of new posts.
In the first, appropriately titled “Are you sure it’s going to work?“, Ben talks about how he thinks everything is ready to go from the Host side – the new raceway design has performed flawlessly in all of its tests. Lets hope that it continues to do so during the competition.
In the second post, we learn that the team from the National Space Society (NSS) will, alas, not be competing – done in by money problems. This is very sad; though they were ‘late to the party’ in terms of getting things ready, they appeared to have finally overcome all of their technical hurdles (as chronicled here and at the official site of the Space Elevator Games over the past couple of weeks). And I hope they’re not counting on competing next year – I think we have an excellent chance of awarding all of the prize money in this year’s competition.
So we’re down to three teams; the Kansas City Space Pirates, Team LaserMotive and USST. In his latest post, Ben describes them as the “robotic club hobbyists”, the ‘industry team’ and the ‘university student team’ respectively. There’s nothing amateurish about any of them – they’re all highly skilled, very motivated and very ready. Barring unforeseen weirdness, we should see numerous prize-winning capable runs. Ben’s take on each of these teams is highly interesting reading – be sure to check it out.
Only 7 more days!
Woot! Go Saskatchewan!
Great blog!
I agree – go Saskatchewan!