session 3

Title: The Modern Day Space Elevator as a Permanent Transportation Infrastructure
type: oral
Description: Recent research projects have progressed to the point where many segment level concepts should be initiating the engineering development stage. The engineering design process has five phases for such mega-projects: 1) define the problem, 2) expand the major segment concepts through brainstorming, 3) Create an initial solution with segment level designs, 4) Build prototypes of each of the segments for engineering testing, and 5) refine the design resulting in production ready segments. As the space elevator community has come together and conducted many of the functions of the first three steps, the next major activity should be to design, build, and test each of the segments of space elevator infrastructures. That would include the following segments: Earth Port, Tether Climber, Tether, Apex Anchor and Operations Center. Several of these segments have significant research results helping to prepare us for this new phase. Much of the research results are at the Body of Knowledge for Modern Day Space Elevators at www.isec.org. The next few years will result in several testing programs that will help refine the designs of each of these space elevator’s five segments. This Congress session could address research in any of the five phases of development, with emphasis in preparing for testing and refinement of preliminary designs.

IPC members

Co-Chair: Dr. Peter Swan, Space Elevator Development Corporation, United States;
Co-Chair: Dr. Yoji Ishikawa, Obayashi Corporation, Japan;
Rapporteur: Mr. Daniel Griffin, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden;