{"id":1215,"date":"2009-06-19T02:58:34","date_gmt":"2009-06-19T07:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1215"},"modified":"2009-06-19T02:58:34","modified_gmt":"2009-06-19T07:58:34","slug":"testing-and-more-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1215","title":{"rendered":"Testing and more testing…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>First a quick status update.\u00a0 Wednesday’s problem with the steel cable snapping was caused by a pulley failure.\u00a0 Once this pulley failed, it sheared the cable.\u00a0 This failure\u00a0halted operations for the day so that all the relevant parties could get together and decide what happened and how to fix it.\u00a0 The pulley was rated for the load, but evidentally the very high spin rate of the pulley, with the load it was carrying, caused it to fail.\u00a0 A much more beefed up pulley should take <\/a>care of this issue.\u00a0 Other than that, Wednesday’s testing of the raceway setup went very well.\u00a0 Over at www.spaceelevatorgames.org<\/a>, the official site of the Games, there are more details about this.<\/p>\n

Today, Thursday, we began laser testing with the laser provided by TRUMPF.\u00a0 This also went very well.\u00a0 The Kansas City Space Pirates team were the guinea pigs in this testing.\u00a0 It took time to work out exactly what should be tested, how it should be tested, <\/a>what the procedures should be for ‘laser protocol’, etc.\u00a0 The end result was that the laser system performed flawlessly and the Space Pirates system performed at a very high level too.\u00a0\u00a0 The Space Pirates passed all of their tests save one, a stress test which will have their system handle the full-power (8 KW) laser feed from TRUMPF and do so for a length of time simulating how long they would need it to send their climber up the kilometer long cable.\u00a0 This will be done first-thing tomorrow morning.\u00a0 Once that is completed, the other teams here, ready to go, will also do their laser testing.\u00a0 Team LaserMotive also underwent laser testing and passed a less-stringent test (they did not have their full-power laser system onsite), so it was a good day all around…<\/p>\n

The first picture (above)\u00a0is of an all-hands meeting held before testing began on Wednesday.\u00a0\u00a0Everyone who was involved in any way was required\u00a0to attend this meeting.\u00a0 As you can see, it is quite a crowd.<\/p>\n

The second picture (above) is of the helicopter we used.\u00a0 It is an S-58 and is supplied by Aris Helicopters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The\u00a0third picture (also above)\u00a0is of the winch which holds the steel cable that the Climbers will be ascending\/descending.\u00a0 This cable will be anchored on one end (the ground end) by the winch and on the other end (the up-in-the-air end) by the helicopter.\u00a0 The winch is the more active partner of the two; paying out and reeling in the cable as necessary.<\/p>\n

<\/a>And, the last two pictures are of the local area.\u00a0 The first is of a Joshua tree<\/a> (Yucca brevifolia<\/em>).\u00a0 These trees grow in the desert here and are starkly beautiful.\u00a0 They can be seen all along the highway here in the Mojave desert.<\/p>\n

<\/a>And finally, this last picture is a small portion of the enormous number of windmills in this area (the Tehachapi area).\u00a0 I am told that here in Tehachapi is where wind farms were started in the US.\u00a0 They’re amazing to see, both in their size and the sheer numbers of them around – there have to be several hundreds of them.<\/p>\n

As always, click on any of the picture thumbnails for a larger version of the picture.<\/p>\n

More tomorrow…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First a quick status update.\u00a0 Wednesday’s problem with the steel cable snapping was caused by a pulley failure.\u00a0 Once this pulley failed, it sheared the cable.\u00a0 This failure\u00a0halted operations for the day so that all the relevant parties could get together and decide what happened and how to fix it.\u00a0 The pulley was rated for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements","category-spaceelevatorcompetitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}