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AnConn Progress Report

October 15th, 2007

On the road again!

I'm leaving for Salt Lake City in a few minuets. I should arrive there late Wednesday. I'm bringing Sky Hopper (our climber) with me for display. If you want to see how it works, “come on down!”. In the mean time, here's a picture.

October 3rd, 2007

Another one bites the dust.

Yes, the unthinkable has happened. Andromeda Connection is throwing in the towel on the 2007 Space Elevator Games.

Why? About a month ago we discovered that the solar cells we have will not handle the 40+ suns our system was designed to run on. This sent us scrambling for new cells. We found several manufacturers who make the type of cells we need but the majority of them wouldn't even answer the phone or return messages. The ones that did were very helpful and were willing to make us some cells but didn't have any cells in stock. With the given time frame, we had to buy from stock.

So, will we be attending anyway? The answer is yes! I wouldn't miss it! Spaceward has encouraged us to attend and even to showcase our technologies, even though we won't be participating.

Will we be participating the German Space Elevator Games instead? Unlikely. The organizers of that event never did, as far as we know, announce any kind of prize purse. I don't see how anyone could make any kind of investment in an event not knowing if there is any possibility of a return on the investment. The whole thing seems a little sketchy to me.

Will we be attending next year's games? Very possible. After all, we have a head start on the project. Given another year of development, they'll have trouble keeping the cameras on our climber ;). We'll have to see what next year's requirements are before a decision is made.

But all is not lost. Through all the research and testing involved in building our climber, we have come up with several patentable technologies which we will be pursuing over the next year. See our page on New Developments for more info on these new technologies. This web site will soon be converted to reflect the progress on these various projects.

This will be the last update regarding Andromeda Connection's involvement in the 2007 Space Elevator Games. Periodic announcements will follow regarding progress on our new technologies. Those of you who are on my mailing list but don't want to receive these updates, please let me know. Others who are not on my list but wish to be, let me know.

September 6th, 2007

I would like to welcome Dan Scharff to the team. Dan has been helping for a few weeks now, I just haven't had time to post anything here lately. Dan is ABD in aerospace engineering and has been a tremendous asset to the team. He has assisted greatly in both calculations and hand on construction as well as having a lot of great ideas.

August 20th, 2007

This is just a quick post to explain a bit about the MOLPSoL solar laser. Of course I can't divulge too much here until the patent pending status is established. But I have had some inquiries as to how it is possible to make a laser from sun light, which is white light. There was even someone from Madrid Spain doing a Google search on MOLPSoL (I used to be the person who is referred to in many corporate offices as “the web guy”, so I know how to track and find this stuff).

According to the American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition, a laser is “A device that produces a very narrow, highly concentrated beam of light”. Anyone who knows anything about lasers will know that this is not quite accurate and is a pretty loose definition. But the definition I am using none the less. I would have called it a solar collimator (MOLPSoC), but I find the word collimator to be too hard to say, and besides, it doesn't sound as flashy.

On the other hand, even though the MOLPSoL doesn't use a single frequency of light as defined by a true laser, it can be tuned to a relatively narrow bandwidth. A collimated beam of white light cannot maintain convergence due to the different frequencies of light interfering with each other thereby causing divergence in the beam (in English: the photons, or light particles, traveling at different speeds collide with each other and cause the beam to spread). However, a well tunned MOLPSoL, using a fairly narrow bandwidth, can maintain convergence for fairly long distances.

The MOLPSoL we will be using for the 2007 space elevator competition will not be as finely tuned as we would like due to lack of funds but, over a distance of 100 meters it will be more than adequate. The MOLPSoL is a modular system and can be expanded as needed depending on the energy requirements. The system we will be using at the competition will take 192ft2 of solar energy and concentrate it down to a ~1.4ft2 beam, or approximately 137 to 1. This will then be dispersed at the climber to give just over 5 suns of energy to the climber. Nearly 100% of the energy in the beam will be used by the climber with little or no spill over.

Now if I could only find someone willing to provide the cost of the parts needed to tune the MOLPLoL to a narrower bandwidth we'd be in even better shape than we are now (hint, hint).

August 8th, 2007

I know, I know. I've been negligent in my progress reporting. It's been a while since the last one. I am currently working 12 - 14 hours/day, 7 days/week on this, so there's not much time left for writing updates. But a lot of work has been done and there is much good news.

First piece of good news: My good friend Tom Kruer has agreed to come on board as a member of the team. Tom has been offering advice and suggestions all along, but now he will have even more involvement. Tom has been involved with the innovation industry for decades and comes up with a lot of great ideas.

I'm sure most of you have seen the new pictures and videos in the Photo Album. Well, the two halves of the drive system are done and mounted on the main body, and they look really good. And as you saw in the videos, they preform great! If you look at the new pictures there, you'll notice I replaced the belts and pulleys with chain. Why? Because the tension needed to keep the belts from slipping used too much power. Turns out the chain is lighter anyway, due to the use of very small sprockets where large pulleys were needed previously.

One piece of news that seemed disastrous at first ended up being a blessing in disguise. While running the power tests on the motors it was noted that they were drawing far more power than the spot lights where going to supply. When originally designing the climber and light source back in January, I was tossing around the idea of building a solar laser, but decided the spot lights didn't have any cloud allergies. When the issue with the motors came up last week, I thought again about the solar laser and completed the design. The MOLPSoL solar laser was born (more on what this stands for later). It seems the solar laser will be easier and cheaper to build anyway, and the odds of cloud cover during the 3 day event are acceptable. It was therefore decided that a MOLPSoL solar laser would replace the spot lights, providing 6 suns of light energy instead of the original 2 suns expected from the spot lights. It should be noted here that the output of a solar cell is almost proportionally linear to the amount of light provided. Therefore a solar cell, or array, will produce almost 6 times the energy with 6 suns as the same cell with 1 sun, as long as you can keep it cool. Replacing the spot lights with the MOLPSoL will provide more power and greater speed than originally planned.

Construction on the solar laser will begin later this week. Both the steel for the frames and the mirrors are scheduled to arrive Thursday. Also, a friend is coming on Thursday to help for a week. We should be able to get the bulk of the climber completed and at least 2 of the 7 MOLPSoL modules done by the end of next week. We will have the climber as well as at least 3 of the 7 MOLPSoL modules complete before the September 19th deadline.

BTW, I have 6 – 2500W/220V long throw spot lights for sale. Asking $1200.00 each, plus shipping. Any takers?

May 2nd, 2007

This is our first progress report. Although Andromeda Connection has been an officially registered team (team #236) in the 2007 space elevator competition since mid-January, We have been extremely busy designing, building and testing since then. This means we have a lot to report at this point.

After months of pounding a keyboard and generating several hundred computer simulations, we have what we feel to be a substantially advanced climber design along with a powerful and accurate beam source. Construction has begun on both the climber and the beam source. At this time, ~95% of the parts and materials for the beam source are in hand and the structure itself is ~4% complete. For the climber, ~95% of the parts and material are in hand and the main body of the climber is ~90% complete. The main body represents ~30% of the total effort needed to construct the climber.

We have also done a great deal of testing of both material and theory. The developers at Andromeda Connection are working on several technologies to boost the efficiency of our climber. One of these technologies was recently tested and has been proven to increase solar cell output by 18.5% or more. This technology is clearly unique to Andromeda Connection and will have patent pending status by the competition date.