{"id":2033,"date":"2014-11-22T19:47:05","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T01:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=2033"},"modified":"2014-11-22T19:49:52","modified_gmt":"2014-11-23T01:49:52","slug":"weekend-walkabout-from-india-to-broadway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=2033","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Walkabout – From India to Broadway…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In this Weekend Walkabout, we travel to India<\/strong> (learning about a Space Conference and why that’s important to fans of the space elevator) and then to Singapore<\/strong> (finding a “space elevator” at the Space Invention Camp) and then on to England<\/strong> (watching a cool video of a carbon nanotube ‘forest’) and finally winding up on Broadway<\/strong> (for a really short story with a space elevator in it).<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>First up is a Space conference being held early next year in India.\u00a0 The second International Space Conference<\/a> is being held on January 8th and 9th at Amity University in Noida, India.\u00a0 While this conference will be focusing on “normal” space subjects (satellites, interplanetary missions, etc.), the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISESC)<\/a> will also be represented there by Mr. Sourabh Kaushal.\u00a0 Sourabh has presented at previous Space Elevator Conferences and was also a contestant in the now-defunct Artsutanov-Pearson competition.\u00a0 He will have several ISEC publications (ISEC reports and CLIMB – the Space Elevator Journal) to hand out and talk about while he’s there.<\/p>\n

I have written about India and the space elevator before<\/a>, discussing my belief that they could be a real player whenever a space elevator becomes viable.\u00a0 They have a real space program<\/a> with many impressive achievements, a real military (necessary to defend a space elevator) and open sea lanes to two locations in the Indian ocean that the Edwards-Westling baseline book<\/a> indicated as prime possibilities to locate a space elevator.\u00a0 Add to this their national obsession with beating China<\/a> in every way they can and I think they must be taken seriously when the materials finally become available to build a space elevator.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Recently I blogged about a study<\/a> done several years ago extolling the virtues of the island nation of Singapore relating to building a space elevator.\u00a0 I just found a video<\/a> of a “space elevator” being part of, I believe, the Wonderswork Space Invention Camp<\/a> being held in Singapore in November and December of this year.<\/p>\n

You can see a Lego poster in the background of the video.\u00a0 Young (ages 5 and up) children use these Legos and then advance to Lego Mindstorm kits to build various projects, including the ribbon climber shown in the video.\u00a0 It’s nice to see kids as young as this exposed to these types of technologies.<\/p>\n

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Next up is a video of a carbon nanotube forest grown at the University of Cambridge in England.\u00a0 Sadly, they talk about growing these nanotubes for “…their use in various electronic devices…<\/em>” but Cambridge is also one of the leading research institutions in examining the materials\/structural properties of carbon nanotubes (along with Rice University and the University of Cincinnati).<\/p>\n