{"id":1226,"date":"2009-07-10T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T17:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1226"},"modified":"2009-07-10T12:00:41","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T17:00:41","slug":"station-keeping-at-1km-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1226","title":{"rendered":"Station Keeping at 1km+ high&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/media\/2007Crane.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/media\/tn_2007Crane.jpg\" class=\"alignleft\" width=\"200\" height=\"113\"  \/><\/a>In the previous Climber \/ Power-Beaming competition portion of the Space Elevator Games, the &#8216;raceway&#8217; tether was held aloft by a crane.\u00a0 Each year this tether distance became higher, culminating in a 400 foot tether in the most recent competition.<\/p>\n<p>For this year&#8217;s competition, the raceway is a full kilometer long &#8211;\u00a0 and a crane just isn&#8217;t going to cut it.\u00a0 Several ideas were looked at including using a balloon, holding it up inside a (very tall) building, holding it up along side a (very tall) building, but in the end, the idea of using a helicopter to hold the raceway aloft turned out to be the best option.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/media\/2009Helicopter.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/media\/tn_2009Helicopter.jpg\" class=\"alignright\" width=\"200\" height=\"150\"  \/><\/a>Though this solved the problem of how do you hold up such a long tether, it presented another problem &#8211; namely how does the helicopter pilot keep the aircraft in a relatively stable position?\u00a0 At such a height and in such a featureless location, this caused some concern.<\/p>\n<p>At the official website of the Space Elevator Games, Ben Shelef <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorgames.org\/dynon-avionics-high-altitude-station-keeping\/\" target=\"_blank\">tells us<\/a> how this problem was addressed. \u00a0 The solution is very ingenious&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>(The first picture thumbnail is of the crane used in the 2007 competition.\u00a0 The second picture thumbnail is of the helicopter which is going to be used in this year&#8217;s Games. \u00a0 Click on either thumbnail for a larger version fo the picture)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the previous Climber \/ Power-Beaming competition portion of the Space Elevator Games, the &#8216;raceway&#8217; tether was held aloft by a crane.\u00a0 Each year this tether distance became higher, culminating in a 400 foot tether in the most recent competition. For this year&#8217;s competition, the raceway is a full kilometer long &#8211;\u00a0 and a crane [&hellip;]<\/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-1226","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\/1226","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=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}