Editor’s Note

Dear Fellow Space Elevator Enthusiast,

In our April Newsletter, we included an article on the Cambridge Rock Festival.

The Cambridge newspaper wrote an article titled, “Astronomy talks follow star performers at returning Cambridge Rock Festival.”

The link to it can be found here:

https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-talks-follow-star-performers-at-returning-cambridg-9256454/.

Enjoy!

Sandee Schaeffer
Newsletter Editor

President's Corner

by Pete Swan

The Beauty of ISDC-22

The term beauty is defined as: a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Usually it is applied to flowers, people, automobiles, or just the combination of sights within one’s view. As ISEC had a very good representation at this year’s International Space Development Conference, we had a very good view of the remarkable events occurring within the space community. It was a beautiful event. It had very high-quality content, discussions that challenged each of our minds, presentations that were out of this world, and positive reflections of our hopes for the future. As such, I believed this conference pleased our aesthetic senses and ensured we came away with a better understanding of where humanity is going in the near future. Some of the exciting and “pleasing” events of the 3-day conference were:

Space Solar Power workshop and NASA announcement 

A full day and a half was dedicated to this topic with major speakers from around the world (China, Japan, UK, ESA, US, and India) with perspectives and new concepts for global/local power demands, technological breakthroughs, and experimental results. In addition, it became known that NASA was to initiate a study to reexamine space-based solar power. A NASA official said that the agency's Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy has started a study to examine how changes in technology and economics could make solar power from space competitive with terrestrial energy sources (near term study completed by September.)

Space Elevator Track

The Space Elevator track was a huge success with standing room only (more than 100 people) and an interactive series of presentations with a panel. The title was “Permanent Infrastructure - Space Elevators as a Transformational Capability.”

ISDC space elevator track

The image above shows the presenters during that afternoon. From left to right: Larry Bartoszek, Jerry Eddy, Eugene Luevano, Kevin Barry, Dave Dressler, Dennis Wright, and Pete Swan.

This year, Dennis Wright led the hour long panel as essentially all Q&A. The questions were penetrating and well thought-out, but our skilled panelists answered well: Eugene, Kevin, Dave, Pete, and Dennis.

Lunches and Dinners

The lunches and dinners were remarkable in their reach of topics and speakers. Sunday’s dinner awarded the Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award to Lori Garver for “her important work in promoting the agency’s pioneering Cargo Resupply Services and Commercial Crew Programs” thus creating the commercial competition responsible for driving down launch costs. Her talk after dinner stimulated the audience into wild cheering and enthusiastic participation in the ceremony. The topic resonated with all those in the room who are looking for a robust movement off planet fueled by the commercial motive and exploration desire.

Students

The involvement with students is always remarkable within an ISDC. They had the yearly NSS Space Settlement Contest supporting students from around the world (17,000 students from 22 countries) designing their own space settlements. This year the grand prize winner was from Ireland and featured a space elevator on the dwarf planet Ceres (more next month on this effort). One of the beautiful aspects of the ISDC each year is the remarkable participation of students and their teachers from around the world. This year India and Romania had the most student winners and presenters.

All in all, the conference was beautiful with all the students challenging the space professionals as to what their future will be like.

ISEC partners with KCL Space

ISEC is proud to announce a new partnership with King’s College London Space Society. KCL Space is a student-run society that consists of over 200 students who are enthusiastic about space. Our past intern from 2019, Sophia Lee Roberts, was a member.

Two members of ISEC, Adrian Nixon and Dennis Wright, have both been interviewed for their podcast called “Across the Karman Line.”

You can view Adrian Nixon's interview at Across The Kármán Line: Episode 4 with Adrian Nixon and Debbie Nelson - YouTube.

Dennis Wright's interview will be posted, shortly.

We look forward to collaborating with KCL Space in future podcasts, workshops, and hackathons.

Learn more about KCL Space at https://www.kclspace.com/.

Space Elevator 101

Get in on the Ground Floor

Sorry for the play on words, everyone, but coming up on June 25th, we'll have a webinar dealing with the basics of the space elevator. If you are new to the space elevator concept, this is the webinar for you.

In this era of New Space, the space elevator could play a large role assisting the move off planet and supporting space solar power. How can Elon Musk support his plan to put 1,000,000 tons [of equipment] on Mars?

It has to be the space elevator.

How can a large number of solar power satellites be built?

It has to be the space elevator.   

How does the space elevator work? When will it be built? How much mass can it put into space?

Join us on the 25th and find out!   

The webinar is free, but you will need to register. Details will appear soon at: https://www.isec.org/events

ISEC needs a volunteer

Lead the Space Elevator Challenge

The Green Road to Space Committee (a committee that grew out of the study of the same name) has a few objectives, but the most important is to spread the word that Space Elevators are environmentally neutral in operations and will enable many critically important missions. One such thrust is to have an academic challenge reaching around the world to discuss the attributes of space elevators to transform our access to space in cooperation with advanced rockets. This will be a fall of 2022 academic challenge where students will enter competitive papers and videos in a quest to become one of top three winners. The below draft announcement will look similar to our announcement for the competition in August. We are looking for someone to join the Green Road to Space Committee and lead this activity. Please contact Pete Swan (pete.swan@isec.org) to volunteer or just discuss this opportunity.

Improving Humanity’s Future:
Space Elevator Challenge

Your Challenge: Select one Mission that would be important for humanity's future which would be enormously enhanced by relying on Space Elevators as a robust and "green" access to space. Explain how the Space Elevators’ transformational characteristics will achieve your chosen Mission at GEO or beyond.

Approach: ISEC will conduct a competition for students (ages 17-25) from around the world that would focus on the strengths of Space Elevators Green Road to Space. This reach-out Challenge would enable many young people to study and contribute towards the new ideas that humanity should not significantly impact the environment as its dreams for space are fulfilled.

Process: The selection of winners will be through a process of:

Announcement of Challenge: 1 August 2022

  • Abstract submission and selection

  • 400 words, in English, by 1 October 2022

  • Selections by 15 October

Paper submission and selection

  • 15 pages, PDF in English, by 1 December 2022

  • Winners selected by 1 January 2023

Video submission

  • Ten-minute mp4 file in English by 25 January 2023

  • Placed on ISEC YouTube channel, and

  • Possible invitation to present at ISEC meeting

Selection Process: The selection process from abstracts to papers and then to videos will be competitive and lead to three prize winners.

First place earns $2,000, second place earns $1,000 and third place earns $500.

The selection will be judged upon the following criteria:

  • Insight into future possible missions for space elevators,

  • The impact of the space elevators’ transformational strengths,

  • Presentation of the arguments in favor of space elevators, and

  • Creative concepts for using space elevators that lead to a better future for humanity.

Current Need: A volunteer to lead this global effort encouraging students to study space and space elevators.

History Corner

by David Raitt

On 12 May 2022 at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri there was a short programme devoted to The Life & Legacy of Space Pioneer Jerome Pearson (1938-2021). Sponsored by Jerome’s sister Mary Atterbury and her husband Alan, the programme featured presentations by two of Jerome’s former colleagues: Dr David Raitt, ISEC Chief Historian, and Joe Carroll, President of Tether Applications Inc. Their presentations can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/710843000.

ISEC Mid-Year Intern Winners Announced

Each year, ISEC accepts applications from students in their third or fourth years of university to participate in space elevator research. This year, the two winners are excited to conduct research towards advancing Space Elevator knowledge. The focus will be along the theme that Space Elevators have transformational characteristics and will revolutionize the movement off planet. The two winners are:

Khushi Shah, a mechanical engineering student based in Mumbai, India. Khuyshi is on the Space Generation Advisory Council and co-lead for the “Domi Inter Astra Moonbase team.”

Khushi Shah

Divyanshi Gupta, an astrophysics student at the University of Edinburgh. Divyanshi is the team lead for careers and marketing teams in UK SEDS while supporting the National Student Space Conference in 2022. 

Divyanshi Gupta

Khushi and Divyanshi will be conducting research all summer on a topic agreed upon with their mentor and presenting their results in a paper and presentation. This summer’s research should be a challenge for each of them.

Zotero

Attention ISEC Members: as an exclusive benefit, we are offering you access to the ISEC Zotero database of articles, papers and more. ISEC has built this library over the last year, and more is being added regularly. If you are interested in researching any Space Elevator topic, this could be a great help. Read more about Zotero here: https://www.zotero.org/.  

If you are an ISEC member, you do not need to do anything, you will receive a link from Zotero soon with instructions. If you do not already have a Zotero account, you will need to create one. It is free and must be done using the same email address as that used by ISEC. After creating the Zotero account, you should see the “ISEC” Group. If you already have a Zotero account but linked to another email address then please let us know.

If you are not a current member of ISEC but would like access, sign up here: https://www.isec.org/membership. (Note: this is not the same as subscribing to this newsletter.)

Tether Materials

by Adrian Nixon, Board Member, ISEC

Carbon Nanotube / Graphene Yarn

My colleagues at ISEC are constantly scanning the research literature for new high strength materials. The latest to appear on the radar is work done by an international team led by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) with the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Rice University, USA [1].

The team set a goal of making an ultra-strong fibre from carbon nanotubes (CNTs). While CNTs are very strong they can only be made in short lengths. So, this work made a long length of yarn formed from many short CNTs spun and overlapped together. They annealed this at very high temperatures to turn the CNTs into multilayer graphene / graphitic material. The resulting yarn had a tensile strength double that of Kevlar.

The following graphic summarises the new process:

tether materials picture 1

At first sight the new CNT yarn appears to be very strong, with a tensile strength of 6.57 GPa. Kevlar has a tensile strength of 3.62 GPa [2.] The yarn is also electrically and thermally conductive. This means it could have applications as a fibre for making woven ballistic protection (lightweight body armour, for example). 

Dear reader, you will have noticed that as impressive as this yarn appears to be, it needs to be an order of magnitude stronger to be considered as a candidate tether material.

If you also look more closely at the way the CNT yarn was made, you will see what is actually happening during the process. The individual carbon nanotubes are being squashed flat. Then the high temperature unzips the nanotubes to form flat sheets of graphene.  The team behind this work think that these graphene sheets overlap and crosslink together to a certain extent. 

In effect, this process turns carbon nanotubes into a yarn made from layers of polycrystalline graphene nanoplates. This means while we should still be open minded about new materials developments, we should still keep our attention focussed on large-area single-crystal multilayer graphene as the material of choice for the space elevator tether.

References:

1. Lee, D., Kim, S., Hong, S., Madrona, C., Oh, Y., Park, M., Komatsu, N., Taylor, L., Chung, B., Kim, J., Hwang, J., Yu, J., Lee, D., Jeong, H., You, N., Kim, N., Kim, D., Lee, H., Lee, K., Kono, J., Wehmeyer, G., Pasquali, M., Vilatela, J., Ryu, S. and Ku, B., 2022. Ultrahigh strength, modulus, and conductivity of graphitic fibers by macromolecular coalescence. Science Advances, 8(16).

2. Anon, 2022. Kevlar Aramid Fibre: technical guide. [online] Dupont.com. Available at: <https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/safety/public/documents/en/Kevlar_Technical_Guide_0319.pdf> [Accessed 17 May 2022].

3. Nixene Journal, 2021. The graphene and graphite landscape: Indications of unexplored territory. [online] 5(10), pp.9-20. Available at: <https://www.nixenepublishing.com/open-access-paper/> [Accessed 11 April 2022].

Upcoming Events:

Space Elevator 101Webinar

Sponsored by the International Space Elevator Consortium
Saturday, June 25th, 2022
https://www.isec.org/events

Virtual Space Elevator Conference

Sponsored by the International Space Elevator Consortium
https://www.isec.org/events
Topics: Transformational Permanent Space Infrastructure; Tether/Climber interface & Dual Space Access Architecture
Friday, August 19th through Saturday, August 20th, 2022
Registration: TBD

73rd International Astronautical Congress

Sponsored by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
https://www.iafastro.org/events/iac/iac-2022/
Sunday, September 18th through Thursday, September 22nd, 2022
Paris, France

The Space Elevator session takes place Monday, September 19th from 3:00 PM until 5:30 PM local time. It will be Session 3 “Modern Day Space Elevators Entering Development” of the 20th IAA Symposium on Visions and Strategies for the Future.

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