International Space Elevator Consortium
November 2022 Newsletter

In this Issue:

Editor’s Note
President’s Corner
Tether Materials
Upcoming Events
Contact Us/Support Us

Editor's Note

I want to tell you about a Vlogger named Anton Petrou who recently did a podcast about Space Elevators and even mentions ISEC! Watch his YouTube video and check out some of his other offerings. I ended up watching a bunch of them when I should have been working on the newsletter.

Thank you to ISEC member, Grant Devlin, for drawing our attention to this!

Sandee Schaeffer
Newsletter Editor

President's Corner

by Pete Swan

Accepting Invitations – an Outreach Approach

The essence of ISEC outreach is that we talk to people who are critical to the future of Space Elevators. Where is that? Who is that? When is that? Of course, we cannot know the answers to all these questions. Some of the critical arenas are: government concurrence of the project, international approval of communications requests, commercial development companies for each segment of the system, educational institutions that will have influence on the space future, individuals who might want to work towards the future of humanity though space elevator projects, and, of course, the big one–our future customers. The real concern is that we might miss an opportunity to “touch base” with someone who might have a major impact on our future development. How do we ensure this does not happen? We cannot! But we can ensure that we grab opportunities that surface. Of course, our Outreach Program has been very successful over the last few years. How do we measure success? We do that with the involvement of ISEC in two major conferences, the International Space Development Conference sponsored by the National Space Society and the International Astronautical Congress sponsored by the International Astronautical Federation.

Where am I going with this President’s Corner? I am hoping that each of you will ask yourself if you have accepted/initiated speaking engagements and writing assignments that could lead to spreading the word about ISEC. Recently, we have had some opportunities surface and I would like to use them as examples of local openings that we, inside ISEC, should appreciate and “jump into.” Do you have similar opportunities in your local area? It turns out you need to look for them as they sneak into areas of convenience for them and many are not well advertised. Here are four that have recently arisen:

• IAA International Space Solar Power 2022 Workshop and Symposium International Academy of Astronautics, Paris, France, attended 9/23/2022.

• Dreaming of Space: Forget Rockets, Take a Space Elevator Instead! Hope Academy of Senior Professionals (HASP) Holland, Michigan, presented via zoom 10/11/2022

• Massive Lift to Mars – Everyday As Fast as 61 days Mars Society 25th Anniversary Convention, Phoenix Arizona, presented 10/22/2022

• The Role of Advanced Transportation (Space Elevators) in Lunar Develpment Moon Village Association, Los Angeles, California, will present 11/8/2022

Please search out and support local events that could expand our outreach. If you need charts or support, let me know.

Tether Materials

by Adrian Nixon, Board Member, ISEC

Snowflake Graphene

Regular readers will know that graphene is currently manufactured by the chemical vapour deposition (CVD) process. This involves heating methane and hydrogen to around 1000° C near a smooth metal surface, usually copper foil.

Industrial manufacturing technology still has some way to go before tether quality graphene can be routinely made. One of the issues is the quality of the graphene.

A tether needs to be made from tens of thousands of individual layers of graphene rather like the pages of a book. Each of these layers needs to be as free from defects as possible.

The language we use is to describe defect free graphene as ‘single crystal’ and graphene containing defects is described as ‘polycrystalline’.

General Graphene is an industrial manufacturer of CVD graphene, based in the USA, and one of their scientists released an image of a test sample for a photographic competition [1]. It will help you understand how defects arise when making graphene.

The image was made using an electron microscope that magnified a graphene sample on copper foil by 2,500 times. It shows a rather elegant snowflake pattern. The ‘snowflakes’ are one atom thin crystals of graphene on the surface of the copper foil.

The snowflake pattern is caused by graphene crystal domains growing from multiple places on the copper foil at the same time. Think of frost growing on a window and you’ll get the idea. In the picture above the growth process was deliberately halted by allowing in oxygen from the ambient air. This revealed the growing process in all its intricate glory.

The crystal domains start to grow independently of one another. This means their crystalline patterns are randomly oriented relative to the other domains. As the domains grow, they eventually collide. Where they are aligned, they connect to form a single crystal. Where they are misaligned, they create crystal defect boundaries, called Stone-Wales defects [2].

This illustrates just one of the challenges of making single crystal graphene of tether quality. You will appreciate there are many others. The key to solving problems is to identify them in the first place. This problem has its solutions and single crystal graphene has already been made in the laboratory.

The reason for telling you all this is to convey the understanding that making graphene is hard. Manufacturing single crystal graphene for the space elevator tether is even harder. However, it is not impossible and that is what makes our work exciting.

References

[1] Barton, S. (2022). Snowflake graphene. [online] LinkedIn. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6991201503273242625/

[Accessed 27 Oct. 2022].

[2] Nixon, A. (2021) “The graphene and graphite landscape: Indications of unexplored territory.” Nixene Journal 5 (10) 8-19.

Upcoming Events

International Space Development Conference

Sponsored by the National Space Society
https://isdc2023.nss.org/
May 25th through May 28th, 2023
Dallas-Frisco, Texas, USA
Theme: A New Space Age

74th International Astronautical Congress

Sponsored by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
https://www.iafastro.org/events/iac/iac-2023/
Theme: “Global Challenges and Opportunities: Give Space a Chance”
Monday, October 2nd through Friday, October 6th, 2023
Baku, Azerbaijan

75th International Astronautical Congress

Sponsored by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
Announcement:
https://www.iafastro.org/events/iac/international-astronautical-congress-2024/
Theme: “Responsible Space for Sustainability”
Monday, October 14th through Friday, October 18th, 2024
Milan, Italy

76th International Astronautical Congress

Sponsored by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
Monday, September 29th through Friday, October 3rd, 2025
Sydney, Australia

Contact Us:

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Our website is www.isec.org.

Support us:

Sign up to be a member at: https://www.isec.org/membership

You could volunteer to assist with any number of activities...let us know where you would like to help!

You can also give directly using the “Donate” link at the bottom of our website page.

Our unique charity link for Amazon Smile is https://smile.amazon.com/ch/80-0302896.

Does your place of employment do matching funds for donations or volunteer time through Benevity? If so, you can make ISEC your recipient. Our 501(c)(3) number is 80-0302896.