Space Elevator Games Roundup - September 29, 2008

The latest from the Kansas City Space Pirates - Space Elevator Blog - This features a note from the KC Space Pirates that not only tells what that team has been doing, but also gives some information about the schedule and location for the 2008 competition. I haven't seen much on that, although obviously it has been moved back.

This prompts me to check the SpaceWard site. You can find 2 documents here with the Helicopter Lift Plan for the Beam Power Competition (a document I haven't run across before) and the latest on the Beam Power rules (which I think I saw an earlier version of). There's also a Tether rule book that hasn't changed.

Noone has signed up yet for the 2008 Tether competition in spite of the bigger cash prize, so I wonder if they'll need to relax the difficulty level later. It's gotten steadily harder over the years, but there were competitors in past years, so perhaps some threshold has been crossed this time. Difficulty levels are sometimes tough to judge with these competitions.

HMS Beagle Science Blog also has the KC Space Pirates post. You might think that the H.M.S. Beagle would be suspicious of encountering Pirates on the high seas, but here's an earlier post where they seem to be friends: I encountered one of the Beagle's customers this morning at the Conoco in Parkville. He said that the KC Space Pirates have completed their trip to Detroit where they tried out their new LASERs and other equipment in an effort to get a working space elevator. The Beagle blog has a KC Space Pirates tag that may be helpful in catching any future Space Pirate encounters covered on that blog. Here's the science store, which like the blog features space activities like rocketry and star parties in addition to other science content.

The McGill Space Elevator Team has had a number of posts the last 3 weeks:

Angling the array

Successful tests = Climber tests coming soon

Taking a look a the smarts

Mechanical updates form the summer - This one features some graphics of the climber.