Editor’s Note

Dear Friend,

Welcome to the August, 2016 edition of the ISEC Newsletter.

The 2016 ISEC Conference was a great success as reported below! Through a variety of presentations and workshops we were able to both educate newcomers and develop new ideas and solutions for old problems. We are now focused on this year's study topic: "Design Considerations for Space Elevator Simulation." As always we are striving to make existing technical and historical research easily accessible on ISEC.org to facilitate participation in our ongoing studies.

In this issue are the current iterations of the President's Corner, The History Committee report and the "Why Space Elevators " column. We also have notices of several new Volunteer positions open (a great way to help this project, even if you're not a scientist or engineer) and a reminder that all ISEC reports are available FOR FREE in electronic (pdf) format.

Finally, this newsletter offers a report from a recent meeting between ISEC research team members and Tethers Unlimited, a Seattle based company specializing in space tethers. This is of particular import as Tethers Unlimited has sophisticated simulation software that could be applied to this year's study topic on Space Elevator simulation.

If you want to help us make a space elevator happen, JOIN ISEC and get involved! A space elevator would truly revolutionize life on earth and open up the solar system and beyond to all of us.

Please don’t forget to LIKE US on Facebook, FOLLOW US on Twitter, and enjoy the photos and videos that we’ve posted on Flickr and YouTube, all under our Social Identity of ISECdotORG.

Thank you! 

ISEC

President's Corner

Innovation 

This month's International Space Elevator Conference was a huge success. We had many innovative concepts and much discussion around them. As such, I would like to delve into the concept of innovation by using quotes from Gijs van Wulfen. He has a new book that deals with the beauty, frustration, and rewards surrounding innovation. Many of the following 15 Quotes are applicable to ISEC.

  • Operational Excellence generates your profits today. Innovation excellence will generate your profits tomorrow.

  • If there's no urgency, innovation is considered as playtime.

  • Innovators need the patience of a hunter to wait for a shot that you're sure you can make

  • Managers say yes to innovation only if doing nothing is a bigger risk.

  • Most Managers behave like dogs. They bark at what they do not know.

  • Organizations frustrate their most innovative employees.

  • A manager want to control innovation and that's where it ends. A leader leads innovation and that's where it starts.

  • Real innovative leaders give both focus and freedom.

  • The problem of brainstorms is the inability of people to let go of the old ideas.

  • When you need a great idea: STOP thinking and go on a holiday.

  • The best innovators are need seekers.

  • You can invent alone, but you can't innovate alone.

  • Think outside the box and present your idea inside the box otherwise nothing happens.

  • Starting innovation is like a child starting to walk. Learn to Love the struggle.

  • Cutting costs innovation is like giving your children less food.

Keep Climbing my Friends -- 

Pete Swan

Notes on the 2016 ISEC Space Elevator Conference

We just wrapped up another amazing Space Elevator Conference Aug. 19-21, 2016 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, USA.  We had attendees from Japan, Norway, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the US. We had great presentations again this year including talks on carbon nanotube synthesis, an upcoming tether climber experiment in orbit, the potential impact of the US Space Act of 2015, new ideas for space elevator architectures, and space elevator operations concepts and capabilities.  Vernon Hall provided the keynote speech on executing a large transportation infrastructure project here on Earth as a reference to what we can expect when constructing the first space elevator. The mini-workshop on the apex anchor, geo node, and communications architecture provided new ideas and valuable inputs for the 2016 ISEC study.  While the second mini-workshop kick started the 2017 ISEC study, Design Considerations for Space Elevator Modelling and Simulation. These workshops are a great way to get everyone involved in the ISEC studies.  The last day of the conference had the ever-popular Shotgun Science session and the Space Elevator Speech competition. Congratulations to Michael Schaeffer, the winner of this year's speech competition.

conference participants

Some of this year's conference participants.

On the Saturday of the conference we held the Family Science Fest.  This included local companies, non-profit educational and service organizations, and schools offering hands-on activities, displays, and demonstrations with the focus on STEM.  Dr. Bryan Laubscher and Dr. Pete Swan gave public talks on the space elevator over in the space gallery.  The Boeing centennial exhibit, Above and Beyond, was also on display at the museum featuring a simulated ride up a space elevator. The day culminated in the Robo Climb finals with junior and high school students competing for prizes by having their robots climb a ribbon. Here are the 2016 Robo Climb prize winners.

tether climbers

One of the LEGO competitors racing up the tether.

(Almost) Anything Goes
1st: 403 points -- Spray Painted Rocks
2nd: 28 points -- Red Shift Reach
3rd: 25 points -- WASABI X

LEGO Only
1st: 675 points -- Meadows Robotics Club #1 - Climber
2nd: 438 points -- WASABI L
3rd: 230 points -- Snoqualmie Robotics

Engineering Award
Winner: Space Invaders
Runner up: Robotic Up Goer

The papers and presentations from this year's conference will be made available on the conference web site by the end of September.  We should have next year's conference dates locked down in the coming month and posted on the conference web site so you can start planning to attend next year. :)

-David Horn, Conference Director

Notes from a recent meeting with Tethers Unlimited LLC

Tethers Unlimited

On Monday August 22nd 2016 a team of six ISEC members, led by President Pete Swan, attended a meeting with Tethers Unlimited (TU) at their offices in Bothell, NE of Seattle. We presented an outline of the ISEC organisation, research aims and the 2017 theme of SE simulation, then learned about the TU 'TetherSim' simulation tool.

TetherSim has been developed by TU over the last 20 years, with functionality including the modelling of tether propagation, electrodynamics, tether physics, environment models, payload models and controls . TU gave us some useful insights, for example the advice that solar pressure is an important factor that could result in eventual SE out-of-plane libration unless countered. We agreed on the importance of model validation and extensive metrology systems.

We hope that the meeting will lead to future collaboration between ISEC and TU, in particular in support of the 2017 conference theme of 'Design Considerations for Space Elevator Simulation'. The expertise that TU brings to the table would be much appreciated.

History Committee Report

This month the History Committee completed our Pilot Summer Internship program with Paul Morrison with great success! He produced a graphic for our Pathfinder Prototype as well as completed new interviews and transcriptions of last year's interviews. He learned a lot and was happy to provide a youtube video which was seen at the ISEC Conference this year. It was considered the best conference yet! We look forward to increasing this program next year and welcome any help you wish to provide! We still look for assistance with transcriptions, especially now that our staff has decreased, so please let me know if you have some time to help by contacting paula.smith@isec.org. All the work is done from the comfort of your home on your own time. Please enjoy a summary of our interview from past years with David Raitt as he introduces some other Space Elevator minds we will feature in months to come. Enjoy!

Summary of interview with David Raitt done July 15, 2014 by Mark Dodrill

At the time of this interview I had been retired from the European Space Agency for heading on for 5 years and for the last 10 or 12 years, I was the Senior Technology Transfer Officer working at the main R&D establishment at ESTEC at Noordwijk in the Netherlands. The earliest recollection I have where anything was happening with a space elevator was when I went to an international workshop on futuristic space technologies in May 2002 in Trieste, Italy. There I met Bob Cassanova from NIAC who spoke about Brad Edward's study on the space elevator. Brad was also at that conference and we had dinner a couple of times and he told me more about his ideas on the space elevator, and particularly the report for NIAC.  After that we kept in touch and he subsequently invited me to the first space elevator conference, which took place in Seattle in August 2002. There I met other interested parties. I agreed to be the ESA contact and recruit and try to orchestrate European efforts to assist the program.

The things that interested me most about the concept of the space elevator were the very uniqueness and imagination of it. It appealed to me because I was always thinking outside the box and this led me to conduct a study in 2001 to look at innovative technologies from science fiction for space applications. The idea was to see whether it would it be possible to do those imaginative advanced things that they were talking about and describing in the sci-fi books and magazines of the 1940s and 1950s with today's technologies or with technologies we knew were just around the corner. The space elevator was one of the concepts that we considered in that study, subsequently leading me to organize an essay competition, involving Brad Edwards. Prizes were offered, provided by Brad, for the best papers on the space elevator, and all the papers were published in a book that same year.

If I consider the most influential people in the concept of the space elevator, then Brad Edwards certainly has to be one right from the start. Another one has to be Michael Lane, who was very much in the early days with Brad, but then they split up with Michael setting up his own company. He has been influential in what he has done, and still is active today. Another one, of course, has to be David Smitherman who also did quite a big study of the space elevator for NASA in the early days, and that study was followed by another by Jerome Pearson on a lunar space elevator. Jerome is still very active today. Then there is Pete Swan who is one of the most influential people today - not only a prolific author in the field, but also the driving force behind trying to get the space elevator up and running in some form or another. Together we introduced the topic at the International Astronautical Conferences and there has been at least one, usually two or three, sessions devoted to the space elevator at every IAC since 2004. Two others from the more distant past who have to be the precursors of the ideas are Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Yuri Artsutanov.  They wrote the original papers that led Brad Edwards, David Smitherman and Jerome Pearson to write more about the concept.

Besides the science fiction study and the competition and resulting book on the space elevator, I have also contributed several other papers, not really technical stuff, to the field. I wrote an illustrated paper on the space elevator in history, art, and literature.  I did a paper on space elevator economics and applications - comparing the scale and costs of a space elevator with other mega construction projects. I was involved in another paper on the textile aspects of tethers. I was also the co-chair, along with Peter Swan, and a study conducted under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics on entitled Space Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility and the Way Forward. This study culminated in a book of the same name published in 2014 and I was an editor for this publication. I have also written a couple of chapters and papers on the whole history of the space elevator and its place in conferences.

Although technology is moving forward in leaps and bounds, it will be at least 20 years or so until a space elevator is built - possibly by the private sector, or the Japanese, or even the Chinese (though we don't know much about their plans). Besides funding, major stumbling blocks at this time are carbon nanotubes, made in proper lengths, joined together somehow, and fashioned into a giant ribbon. Also the skepticism of governments or space agencies and other priorities in conflict with space elevators need to be addressed. But there would be some major benefits of a space elevator for mankind. Getting rid of nuclear waste safely and efficiently would be one. Space based solar power would be another. Using the space elevator to haul up and store water in orbit for subsequent manned missions might be another. We have to convince the major players and possible investors on the value and benefits of the space elevator project so that they will invest and make it happen. More funds are needed for research and development and on aspects like ribbon production. But in fact a host of new industries would be created by the building of a space elevator, and others (such as the nuclear waste disposal industry or space tourism) would have a wealth of new opportunities and business.

Why Space Elevators

Current Thrusts

The increased interest in space elevator, usually peaking around our conference, is encouraging to me. The challenges inside the space elevator project encourage people to chase after unknown answers in fields unfamiliar to them. This is the great fascination to many of us. As such, I have come up with the Space Elevator Paradox to explain why we are so interested in volunteering our time towards the future.

Space Elevator Paradox: Why do anything until the material is ready?

Answer: Because there is so much to do to be ready!

Dr. Peter Swan, President - ISEC

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Please send your inputs to: pete.swan@isec.org.
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