{"id":1447,"date":"2010-12-05T05:58:17","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T11:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1447"},"modified":"2010-12-05T18:12:02","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T00:12:02","slug":"2010-eurospaceward-conference-sunday-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1447","title":{"rendered":"2010 EuroSpaceward Conference – Sunday morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

First up is Dr. Pugno of the Laboratory of Bio-inspired Nanomechanics at the polytechnic Institute of Torino, Italy.\u00a0 Dr. Pugno originally came tot he notice of the Space Elevator community when he began to discuss defects and other potential problems with making a tether suitable for\u00a0a Space Elevator.\u00a0 I remember Brad Edwards being somewhat dismissive of Dr. Pugno’s work, but I think time has proven him correct.\u00a0 Dr. Pugno has been turning his attention to making these cables as strong as possible and today’s talk was on the same theme.\u00a0 He drew parallels to the organic world; if bones, for instance, can heal themselves, why can’t CNTs?\u00a0 If some sort of self-healing capability could be introduced into a cable, then it could become more robust.\u00a0 This was a very interesting presentation and I think there is a real future in this work.\u00a0 The SE community had always postulated repairing the tether, but from macro-size breaks (introduced by space debris, etc.).\u00a0 Dr. Pugno brings this down to the atomic level and his idea may turn out to be vital.\u00a0 He still believes that the maximum strength possible for a cable is 38 GPa…<\/p>\n

Next up is Sourabh Kaushal and Nishant Arora from India, presenting via Skype.\u00a0 Sourabh and Nishant prepared a paper, entering the 2010 Pearson prize and also presented at the 2010 Space Elevator conference in Redmond, Washington.\u00a0 Their presentation was general in nature, discussing Space Elevator concepts.\u00a0 We had technical difficulties with Skype and so their presentation was abbreviated.\u00a0 I believe they were proposing using graphene as an alternative to CNTs, but I’ll have to review their presentation slides to be sure.\u00a0 All of us at the conference were very happy to have a presentation from India.<\/p>\n

Break…<\/p>\n

Professor Kai from Japan then presented his talk; “Who can establish the space elevator?”.\u00a0 Dr. Kai presented the case that only an international organization would be allowed by the world community to build & operate a space elevator.\u00a0 He uses Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty as his justification.\u00a0 This organization would initially be modeled on the existing treaty for the International Space Station, but must be open-ended so that any country can join it.\u00a0 Professor Kai presented his paper via Skype – no technical issues this time.<\/p>\n

Professor Kai was followed by Shuichi Ohno, the president of the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA).\u00a0 Ohno-san talked about\u00a0the\u00a02010 \u00a0JSETEC (Japan Space Elevator Technical & Engineering Competition) event hosted by JSEA, including summarizing the teams that competed and the results of the competition.\u00a0 Ohno-san included several very interesting pictures from the competition in his presentation.\u00a0 Next year, JSEA plans to double the height the climbers must ascend from 300 meters to 600 meters – it will be interesting to see what they use to hold the tether aloft.\u00a0 Ohno-san said that there will be teams from Japan competing in the upcoming EuSEC (European Space Elevator Competition).\u00a0 The JSEA-sponsored LASER competition was also discussed.<\/p>\n

Next up was a presentation by Franciska Volgyi (from the Technical University of Munich – TUM) on EuSEC, Europe’s first Space Elevator Challenge.\u00a0 This is targeted towards student teams and the goals are to establish a European Space Elevator Community, to introduce the Space Elevator concept to he European public and to increase the understanding of the Space Elevator System.\u00a0 They have set up four categories of team entries, starting with remote-controlled, battery powered systems working their way up to autonomous, beamed-power systems.<\/p>\n

The last presentation before lunch was by Mikhail Schwarzbart from the Institute of Mechanics and Mechatronics on the stability of the Space Elevator.\u00a0 This presentation had the most equations of any of them ? but I think the upshot of his presentation was that the modern day concept of a Space Elevator is long enough and has enough mass to\u00a0be inherently a stable system.\u00a0 His model was a simple one, including only the earth and the tether – climbers were not included.<\/p>\n

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

First up is Dr. Pugno of the Laboratory of Bio-inspired Nanomechanics at the polytechnic Institute of Torino, Italy.\u00a0 Dr. Pugno originally came tot he notice of the Space Elevator community when he began to discuss defects and other potential problems with making a tether suitable for\u00a0a Space Elevator.\u00a0 I remember Brad Edwards being somewhat dismissive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447","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=1447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}