Well that was exciting. The KC Space Pirates made all the way to the top, and they did it in about one minute and eighteen seconds. Not enough to win the Prize money, but certainly close enough (especially considering that they didn’t have full sunlight AND some of their Climber’s cells flew off partway up) to make them feel optimistic about their next run (assuming the weather lets them, of course).
The thumbnail (click on it for a larger version) shows their climber once it returned to earth. You can see tha some of the solar panels are missing. Hopefully they are undamaged and re-usable.
So, I think we have some downtime now – I was able to record the entire climb and will be uploading that to YouTube now. As soon as it’s ready, I’ll post it.