SPEC2014

Each year, the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) holds a Climber competition acronymed SPEC (SPace Elevator Challenge) and each year they get more and more ambitious in their goals.  This year they had a 1,200 m long tether held up by balloons.  Climbers are powered by batteries and scores are awarded based on speed, payload, etc.

I had blogged about this previously, but said that videos/pictures/results had not yet been posted.  Now they have.

This video of the competition is very well done.  About 6 minutes and 50 seconds in, there is the rather astonishing segment of 100kg of payload for one of the climbers and then subsequently watching that climber carry it part-way up the competition tether.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand Japanese, you’ll understand everything going on in the video.  It’s in HD, so if you have a big screen monitor, flip the video into full-screen mode, crank up your speakers and enjoy…

The results of the competition can be found here (it’s in Japanese – if that’s not something you can read, open the page up in Chrome and let it auto-translate for you).

Finally, you can see all of the results of the various Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) SPEC (JSETEC) competitions here (again in Japanese).

Something I had also mentioned in the previous post on SPEC2014 was the desire by the JSEA to turn this competition into an International one.  The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) is now trying to recruit individuals to be on a committee to help organize the “American chapter” of this competition.  If you’re interested in participating (and, based on my participation in the Space Elevator Games, I can guarantee you an exciting learning experience if you do), please contact the President of ISEC, Dr. Peter Swan at pete.swan@isec.org.

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