Snowstarring pt. 2

So, I'm back in Vancouver now -- I had originally intended for this to be a series that I'd post while I was up in Utah, but it was busy enough and the Internet connection was spotty enough such that I wasn't really able to realize that. Anyway! I have pictures. They won't necessarily be in chronological order >_>

Here's a picture of the team -- there were 8 of us who went down in total. The eight of us fit into the RV and camper van that is in the pic. The Penske truck served as the place to haul basically our entire lab down, short of full-on machine tools.

Here's a picture of the completed system -- the climber vehicle is mounted on the ribbon, with the two reflectors in place below, directing sunlight onto the solar cells.

Here's a picture of the Snowstar climber close to the apex of its climb -- officially, we made it between 250 to 300 feet on the 400 foot ribbon. We probably could have climbed higher but unfortunately we ran out of time. It was definitely cool to see the cells illuminated from these massive mirrors that were almost a hundred meters away.

Somehow we all managed to find some downtime after we built our system and qualified, and before our final prize run -- here's an amusing shot of 6 of us sitting around and doing homework amidst the bustle of the rest of the teams busily working and trying to qualify.

Some might be curious as to the actual result that our team achieved while down there. Out of 21 teams initially entered in the competition, Snowstar was one of four that successfully qualified for the prize run. No one won the big money this year, though U of S came close again. As for our own performance, we didn't go nearly as quickly as we thought we did; my personal suspicion is from a combination of system inefficiencies as well as damage that we incurred in severe winds during a previous qualification attempt -- the way the solar cells were wired, we were especially susceptible to system performance degradation with broken cells. Nevertheless, we went down there, we climbed on a 400 ft. ribbon, and in the end, that's what we decided to go for.

Snowstarring pt. 1

So, I'm here in Utah now for the NASA Spaceward Beam Power Challenge. I am actually compiling this post from an RV parked on site here -- we're living out of these things for a few days, well, living with 7 other guys out of 2 RV's has been interesting in itself, to say the least. I've got pictures of the drive down (though I seem to have lost track of my camera, and it also ran out of batteries) -- pics later.

After driving all of Friday night and Saturday, we finally arrived in Utah. We unloaded our stuff and promptly got to work; by the end of Sunday we had built almost all of the Snowstar climber vehicle itself, and started work on the reflective ground mirrors to beam sunlight up to our climber. This took up almost all of today, as well -- it was a long day, totaling to fifteen hours with a short hot dog/red bull break. Tomorrow, we're strapping the thing onto a ribbon for the qualifying round. Hopefully there will be pictures soon!

If you're interested in keeping up, check out the official Space Elevator blog for pictures and videos of all of the competing teams! Hopefully I'll have the time and such to post more stuff on here as it becomes available (pics soon, hopefully).

Quasi-monthly update

Still super busy. Especially with Snowstar coming up. In fact: In 15 hours, I will be on a truck heading down to the NASA Spaceward Beam Power Challenge. It'll be interesting to finally see the culmination of what I've basically given up my life to for the last six months.

Wish us luck!

More when I'm back from Utah.