Punkworks will also be there, with a demonstration mockup of a space-based solar power satellite that beams energy down to Earth to power our civilization.  More information to come as my coverage of the event is blogged.

On Sunday, I found out that the McGill team got into an accident en route.  Somewhere near Des Moines, Iowa their trailer started fish-tailing and in an effort to control the vehicle, the trailer flipped on its side and got hit by a semi from behind.  Thank God nobody was hurt.  And miraculously, most of the equipment survived. The most fragile pieces - rectenna, dish, seem to be in order. From personal experience, the Cobers can take a serious amount of beating! Anyways, our team provided them with the Uhaul number to get an emergency haul the rest of the way.

This project is a continual reminder to me of Murphy’s Law. Let’s hope the rest of the week gets better. My next article will be from Utah. Let’s all hope for a safe and enjoyable Space Elevator Games where nobody gets hurt.

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Here’s a snapshot of our wares

After taking a long winter hiatus, our team has a fresh outlook for 2007 but has not forgotten the lessons learned from last year’s competition. The tests and redesign will ultimately determine whether the team will compete in October. In the meantime, a notice of interest has been submitted to the Spaceward Foundation in regards to Punkworks participation in this year’s contest. The team has also garnered outside interest from a silent partner if the beam tests are successful and prove to have enough beam power.

With time ticking down and the 2007 Space Elevator contest looming, our team is abuzz with anticipation for this year’s games.

Our turn came at 3:00 PM but the tether was shaking so wildly, it took us 28 minutes to get our climber attached to the tether. All of us had cuts and scrapes from this ordeal. Then with two minutes to spare Ken Davidian of NASA and Ben of Spaceward told us it was over since it was going to take 10 minutes for us to setup the Cobers and attach them to the generator.

We were all shocked at what just happened. We had the most complex set-up and they had extended the competition an entire day to give us a chance and all we got was a half hour. Even worse, we had to get our climber off the tether to give Space Pirates their fourth chance. We thought it was unreasonable of Spaceward and NASA to only give us a half hour while other teams had an hour to two hours for their first attempts on the tether. If they really did extend the competition another day to give us a chance then we should have had a longer time slot to show what we could do. The media wanted to see a microwave team climb but in the end we weren’t given a full chance. Maybe we should have pleaded our case more and rallied the crowd and media that was present around our cause, but that didn’t cross our minds. Perhaps we were too tired to think and shocked that after coming all this way our dreams were dashed.

All in all it was a learning experience but we left New Mexico with a bad taste in our mouths and like we were treated unfairly. It could have been they didn’t trust microwaves or maybe they just didn’t trust us with microwaves, but either way microwaves weren’t given a chance. Many teams feel that the event could have been run better and that the rules were being changed arbitrarily. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming days and how the event will be run next year, and whether our team will even participate.

We spent some time in the evening in Baylor Canyon, about 15 minutes drive east of Las Cruces.  We found a rattlesnake on the roadside, then drove around to a couple of places to search and explore.  Eventually the fear of the dark came over us and we went back to the fairgrounds.

Spaceward once again informed us of some bad news.  It was going to be impossible to set-up the crane, generator and tether on Saturday night because they had to run the tether competition which was behind schedule.  So instead of leaving for home early Sunday morning as scheduled, we were going to compete on Sunday.  Unfortunately, Athan had a flight scheduled to leave for home at 6 AM Sunday, a devastating loss to the pit crew.