The 2007 Space Elevator Games Begin!

The 2007 Space Elevator Games are scheduled to start this morning. A lot has happened in the qualification rounds. You can read (and watch) all about it at the Space Elevator Blog (already up to on-site post #45 on the games!) and Space Elevator Reference.

The latest news is that the original pre-qualification rounds for the Beam Power Challenge were followed by a final qualification round. This allowed more complete tests. At first it wasn't clear from the reports I'd read that this phase would happen because of weather. The outdoor qualifications are on a big crane, where wind and (for some teams) cloud cover are factors. It turns out that this phase happened. Although 8 Beam Power teams qualified in the first round, only 4 made it through the full qualifications. Check the SE Blog and Reference to see which ones made it, and view the photos, webcams, and videos showing the details.

Those are the main sites to check, but if that's not enough, I thought I'd post some additional links.

LaserMotive posts on getting set up for testing and a bit of confusion about what the pre-qualification runs meant. It sounds like they had a lot of laser work to do for that second qualification that they may have been counting on doing over the course of 2 days.

The Kansas City Space Pirates made a short We're Here post when they arrived at the games. They had a flat tire problem (without the right spare) in the middle of Wyoming. It seems a lot of teams have trouble during the long trips (and shipments) to these games.

USST has a number of news updates and pictures of their climber and cells.

McGill Space Elevator has updates and pictures from their car accident during the trip, debugging problems, and pre-qualification success.

MIT Space Elevator has a photo gallery I hadn't noticed before.

Although not competing, Andromeda Connection is heading for the games and bringing their climber with them. That's the spirit! A photo is included.

I gave a pointer to the pictures in an earlier post, and the Space Elevator Blog already posted the media advisory text a few days ago, but it's nice to see that the UBC Space Elevator Team got a public writeup (with those pictures) in the University of British Columbia news yesterday.