{"id":1778,"date":"2014-10-09T01:05:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-09T06:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1778"},"modified":"2014-10-23T23:19:39","modified_gmt":"2014-10-24T04:19:39","slug":"obayashi-and-the-space-elevator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=1778","title":{"rendered":"Obayashi and the Space Elevator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In February of 2012, the Japanese construction company Obayashi<\/a> announced plans to build a space elevator by the year 2050 (I had previously blogged about this announcement here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>).\u00a0 Recently however, there have been a flurry of stories about the Obayashi project and several readers pinged me about them, wondering “what’s new”.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, nothing is new.\u00a0 The story that started the press avalanche was this one<\/a>, released on September 22nd by ABC-Australia North Asia correspondent Matthew Carney.\u00a0 All of the other Obayashi-Space Elevator stories we’ve seen recently were spin-offs, pick-ups from this one.\u00a0 I contacted Mr. Carney and asked him what prompted him to write the story; was there anything new to report?\u00a0 He replied:<\/p>\n

There was no specific development about the Obayashi space elevator project that prompted the story that was first made known in 2012.\u00a0\u00a0 I ran the story because the ABC has never reported on it and simply because it [is] an amazing story that I assumed an audience would appreciate.\u00a0 In fact the story has been the third most popular story over the entire network in last month.\u00a0 Pretty amazing so looking at doing a follow up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, that’s the scoop, no “new news”.\u00a0 It’s still very encouraging of course, if this is a real project and not a publicity stunt.\u00a0 It’s all going to come down to the materials – if the Japanese engineers (or anybody) can solve this problem, then it all becomes possible…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Incidentally, the Obayashi plan is one of the architectures being compared and contrasted in the current ISEC study, “Architectures and Roadmaps<\/strong>“.\u00a0 It is being primarily coordinated by Michael “Fitzer” Fitzgerald.\u00a0 At the recent Space Elevator Conference, Fitzer gave a presentation as to the status of the study and held a mini-workshop where conference participants could look at, critique and offer suggestions to the report as it stood at that time.\u00a0 I believe the goal is to get this report published sometime early next year.\u00a0 This report will be added to several others produced by ISEC<\/a> and will be available in both printed and electronic format. (Click on the picture thumbnail of Fitzer giving his presentation to the 2014 ISEC Space Elevator Conference to view a larger version)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In February of 2012, the Japanese construction company Obayashi announced plans to build a space elevator by the year 2050 (I had previously blogged about this announcement here, here and here).\u00a0 Recently however, there have been a flurry of stories about the Obayashi project and several readers pinged me about them, wondering “what’s new”. As […]<\/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-1778","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\/1778","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=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1785,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}