2008 Space Elevator Climbers to the Sky

The Space Elevator Blog posts about the Spaceward Foundation's planning for the 2008 Space Elevator Games. The prizes, and the difficulty of the challenge, are both literally going way up for the Climber part of the games:

• The climb will now be 1 kilometer (10 times what was required in the 2007 Games).
  
• There will now be two levels of prizes: $900,000 (for a climb averaging 2m/s and $1,100,000 for a climb averaging 5 m/s).

The magnitude-sized increase in the length of the Power-Beaming climb will now almost certainly mean that only laser-powered entries will be able to successfully compete.

However, the post shows that Spaceward has a way to help the teams meet the expense of laser power beaming ...