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All together now;<\/p>\nAll together now;<\/p>\n
\nHappy birthday to you!
\nHappy birthday to you!
\nHappy birthday\u00a0dear Space Elevator Blog!
\nHappy birthday to you!\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\nYes, I know it’s April Fools day, but this is no joke – one year ago today, I started this blog.\u00a0 It’s been a fun year.\u00a0 Highlights include;<\/p>\n
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- Attending the 2nd Annual Space Elevator Games<\/a> where I was\u00a0fortunate to be selected as\u00a0the “Official Blogger”.\u00a0 I guess I did an OK job because I’ve been selected to be the “Official Blogger” for this year’s Games, too.\u00a0 One of the best things about being at these Games was\u00a0interacting with\u00a0the leaders and members of the various teams that had entered.\u00a0 They are a real “can-do” group and were a lot of fun to be around.<\/li>\n
- Attending the SESI2007 Conference<\/a> where I gave a presentation; “Who will build the first, earth-based Space Elevator”.\u00a0 Also at this conference, I\u00a0was able to\u00a0spend time\u00a0with most of the “hard-core” Space Elevator junkies – always an “uplifting” (pun intended) experience…<\/li>\n
- Meeting such luminaries in the field such as Brad Edwards, Bryan Laubscher, Ben Shelef, Michael Laine and Tom Nugent – people who have been involved in this project for a lot longer than I have.<\/li>\n
- Understanding, to a much greater degree than before, how a Space Elevator really is going to work and being able to intelligently (at least I hope it’s intelligently) think about problems and alternatives.\u00a0 At the recently concluded SESI2007 Conference, Bryan Laubscher gave a talk on the basics of what the current model of a Space Elevator is and how\/why it would work.\u00a0 I\u00a0understand things well enough now that I could have given his talk (though I would have punted had someone in the audience asked me some arcane, technical question about ribbon harmonics or something similar – being able to understand that is next year’s project \ud83d\ude42 ).<\/li>\n
- Watching the traffic at this site steadily grow.\u00a0 I don’t know exactly how many visitors I’ve had since the site has started because a) I didn’t keep statistics for the first couple of months and b) Sitemeter (my stat-counter) has occasionally just “died” and\u00a0consequently lost count of some of the visitors.\u00a0 But in the first year, I’ve had well over 28,000 visitors – and that’s a number I’m pretty happy with.\u00a0 Traffic peaked during the Space Elevator Games; on October 23rd of last year, this site had 1,966 visitors and\u00a0well over 4,000 page views.\u00a0 For the 7-day period of October 18th through October 24th, this site had 10,308 visitors – people wanted to hear about the Space Elevator Games and I (to the best of my knowledge) was the only one doing real-time reporting from the event.\u00a0 Having people mention this site, such as David Livingston on his Space Show<\/a> and Mat Kaplan on The Planetary Society’s Radio show<\/a> has helped immensely.\u00a0 I think\u00a0my continually posting fresh material has helped, too – no one likes visiting a site that hasn’t been updated regularly.\u00a0 This posting will be my 579th on this blog.<\/li>\n
- Being able to join one of the four teams that were created at the recently concluded SESI2007 Conference.\u00a0 As I reported earlier<\/a>, these teams have been set up to further the vision of a Space Elevator.\u00a0 The team I’ve joined,\u00a0the “technology” team, is headed up by Brad Edwards.\u00a0\u00a0Working with someone with his knowledge and\u00a0vision is going to be very exciting – I just hope I can keep up…<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So, what will the next year bring?\u00a0 Who knows?\u00a0 We’re all waiting for the breakthrough in carbon nanotube research that will allow a Space Elevator to be built.\u00a0 If\/when that happens, this whole\u00a0idea will instantly change from an “interesting intellectual exercise” to a real project.\u00a0 I have every intention of being involved in any way I can.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I’ll watch and report everything\u00a0I can find which is Space-Elevator related and I will do whatever I can to further this project along.\u00a0 In addition to working with Brad Edward’s technology team, I’m planning on attending and live-blogging\u00a0this year’s Space Elevator Games and will make every effort to attend the inagural EuroSpaceward version of the Games in 2008.<\/p>\n
Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All together now; Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday\u00a0dear Space Elevator Blog! Happy birthday to you!\u00a0 Yes, I know it’s April Fools day, but this is no joke – one year ago today, I started this blog.\u00a0 It’s been a fun year.\u00a0 Highlights include; Attending the 2nd Annual Space Elevator Games […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-entries","category-news-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580","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=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}