I just watched the DVD last night.  It's pretty cool    The space elevator is mentioned a few times in the movie, though it does not have a lot of 'air time'.

It looks like this experiment was mostly a success, despite some glitches.  Seems like this project's data and learnings would be useful to the SE. I wonder how much technical and operational detail they would be willing/able to share.

Just a follow-up... check out the Space Elevator channel on Jaiku.

The video explains it better than I can (make sure you unmute the audio), but here's the way it works as far as I can tell. The tether is deployed toward Earth. By lowering orbital altitude without decreasing your orbital velocity, you move ahead in the orbit because you're traveling less distance with the same velocity.  So that gets the lower end of the tether ahead of the upper one in the orbit, until the tether brake is applied. The braking causes the lower end to swing back toward perpendicular to Earth's surface due to the gravity gradient. Thus, it's like a pendulum swinging opposite to the direction of orbit. Cutting the tether at the "bottom" of the pendulum swing slows the package enough to deorbit.

Did I get the physics right?

According to the ESA web site, the Young Engineers' Satellite 2 (YES2) experiment (part of the Russian Foton M3 research satellite that was just launched) will deploy a 30 km tether to send a 6 kg reentry capsule back to Earth using the gravity gradient to turn the tether into a slingshot.  The tether (Dyneema/polyethylene) is about 0.5 mm diameter and will be deployed from 260-300 km altitude.  A video on the ESA web site shows how the tether slingshot should work.

I just watched the trailers for Postcards from the Future and noticed that a space elevator is shown.  The movie is fictional but referred to as a 'future documentary'.  It's creator, Alan Chan, says the purpose of the film is to, "help the public visualize the possible future we can build, and to recruit their support for the Initiative. It is the will of the people that will carry us to to the stars."

Has anyone seen this movie yet, either at a screening or film show?

I just found the online library at the National Space Society (NSS) web site.  It has several sections, including a Space Elevator Library.  However, there are currently only 3 documents in the SE library now: a NASA report from 2000 and the NIAC Phase 1 and Phase 2 reports by Brad Edwards. This might be a good opportunity for more SE exposure if there are some documents (or even the wiki) that LiftPort can provide to the NSS library.

That's pretty cool - thanks. 

If you want to watch the presentation Pete Worden gave at the ISDC through Second Life, it's available through Google Video, courtesy of NASA CoLab.

The June 12, 2007 episode of The Space Show is an interview with NASA CoLab folks.  They talk about how and why they use Second Life as well as about CoLab in general. I recommend listening to this episode.   

I just read an article in Wired about how Twitter can create a "social sixth sense". Individual "tweets" are not necessarily very informative, but taken in the aggregate, tweets from your "friends" (people you "follow" in Twitter) can provide a larger sense of what is going on in their lives.  Same goes for Jaiku and other similar tools. This is one reason I personally find these tools useful.

I just read an MSNBC Cosmic Log article commenting on the Pete Worden discussion mentioned above and the NASA CoLab in SL.  Sounds like the talk was pretty interesting.  It looks like NASA is going to use SL to model some things virtually before building them in real life.  And in the future they may use SL (or something similar) to allow the public to actually virtually experience and participate in space missions.  Anyway, I thought we could probably get some ideas from what they are doing in SL.

For anyone that's not aware, Michael has been doing quite a bit of "microblogging" on both Twitter (mostly personal stuff) and Jaiku (mostly LiftPort stuff).  He's even created a SpaceElevator channel on Jaiku. Michael's handle in Jaiku is SpaceElevatorGuy and in Twitter is mlaine.

Jaiku offers several really cool features, including the ability to:

• create channels, as mentioned above
• add RSS feeds (such as for this forum, the LiftPort blog, etc.) to your stream or channel
• comment on posts made by other users (including those generated by pulled-in RSS feeds)
• search for other users

Michael has added a number of LiftPort feeds to the Jaiku SpaceElevator channel to complement the Jaiku posts so you can see the latest goings-on from one easy location. The feeds so far include:

• Michael's Flickr photos
• LiftPort Blog Posts
• LiftPort Blog Comments
• LiftPort News
• LiftPort Forums

Come join the Jaiku SpaceElevator channel and say hello.  And spread the word 

I know essentially nothing about developing software for robots, but I just heard about a robotic software framework from JPL, NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Minnesota called CLARAty.

According to the CLARAty web site, the vision is:
So, I wondered whether something like this would be useful in developing the software for controlling the lifter bots?

Awesome!  I'm looking forward to seeing your work! 

BTW, what software do you use?