Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Space Elevator Blog on the Upcoming Games

The Space Elevator Blog points us to some views that show just how high those beam-powered climbers are going to have to go. This shows how really a unique event this will be.

Here's a post on some press coverage for team USST.

This one has a brief video (more is expected) from the McGill Space Elevator Team.

Here's one that points to a news article on the NASA announcement of the Space Elevator Games. The article points out that all sorts of practical innovations can be expected to come out of pushing technical envelopes with technical competitions like this.

On the SpaceWard (Space Elevator Games sponsor) site, you can see a flyer for a talk by Ben Shelef on the Space Elevator concept for this Friday (Sep 21) at the University of Utah Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I hope this generates a lot of local interest in the games themselves, and that the upcoming games in turn generate a lot of interest in that department and others for the Space Elevator Games.

The SpaceWard site also has an interview of Ben Shelef where he describes the Space Elevator and the Space Elevator Games. He goes into a fair amount of detail on the history of the games and the Tether Challenge. I'm glad to hear about the Tether one, because it's a tough challenge, but also has a lot of near-term applications. He's also enthusiastic about the level of improvement expected in the Beam Power competition this year.