A resurrected LiftPort is kickstarting its space elevator project

Actually the Kickstarter project is only raising money to build a proof of concept experiment that is called the “Climb to the Sky-A Tethered Tower”. The idea is to build a robot that will then climb up two kilometers to the high altitude balloon platform.

According to href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elevator-science-climb-to-the-sky-a-tethered?ref=search">its Kickstarter page, the project will cost $3 million total. LiftPort the company behind the space elevator project was spun out of a NASA program started in 2001. The company wound up going dormant in 2007 for the same reason so many other businesses went bust, the economic crisis. The $8,000 Kickstarter program is a way to advertise that the company is back and is continuing its research and experimentation to eventually build a space elevator.


Michael Laine, the man behind the company and the current project, explains that the technology to build a space elevator from earth doesn’t exist yet, but the technology to build a Lunar elevator does. So rather than go from the earth out to space, the company would first work on going from outer space to the Moon.

The Kickstarter program has more reward levels than most projects. There are 14 rewards that can be earned between $1 and $51. The top tier is $10,000. For that kind of money you get a wide variety of options. You can name the robot. You get access to internal documents about the company. You get to ride the balloons two kilometers up and then parachute back down. For the rest of the offers you really need to check out Kickstarter.

At the lower levels you go from email notifications to bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and t-shirts. There will be a “Group Talk”, a two hour chat with the team, several “Meet-Ups” in select cities and a lot of social media interaction. Clearly, this project is designed more to start people talking about the project than to raise any serious funds.

LiftPort isn’t the only group that thinks a space elevator is possible. Back in February, I reported that the Japanese were planning a space elevator. Their elevator is expected to rise 36,000 kilometers into Geostationary Orbit. The counterweight for the elevator would be 96,000 kilometers high. The project is expected to be several decades away from completion and in the early stages.

Both space elevators would use carbon nanotubes to build the structure for the elevator to ride. LiftPort envisions it more as a ribbon. The Japanese visualize it as more of a column.

Give the project a look and then pitch in a few bucks. If nothing else, your great great grandchildren can say that their ancestors were among the first investors in the space elevator.

The illustration is from the Kickstarter page created by Michael Laine of LiftPort
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Robotic Shark looks for lost ships in the Arctic

A University of Victoria (UVic) team will use an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to look for ships lost 167 years ago in the Arctic. The ill fated Franklin expedition went down in 1845 looking for the Northwest Passage.

According to the University of Victoria in Canada, the two missing ships are called the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. All 129 crew members were lost. According to the CBC, the ships were outfitted with advanced technology for their time period.



Franklin’s vessels, the Erebus and the Terror, were outfitted with steam engines, desalinators, iron plates over their wooden hulls, and propellers and rudders that could be retracted to prevent ice damage.

Fast forward to 2012 and UVic will be using some of the most advanced technology of our time to look for the doomed vessels. The AUV is called “Mano” which means shark. It has a side sonar which will help its handlers identify items on the sea bottom and chart the region.


“Among the challenges, will be navigating the torpedo-shaped vehicle in the northern waters where the magnetic field is erratic,” says research engineer and team leader Alison Proctor. “That’s an integral part of our navigation system and these are uncharted waters, so we are uncertain what to expect.”

The Mano will be controlled by team members in a “16-foot boat that will be launched daily from a Canadian Coast Guard vessel and a research vessel provided by the Arctic Research Foundation”. They will spend 12 to 14 hours a day in the boat. The actual sonar pictures won’t be seen until the end of the day when the AUV resurfaces and the pictures can be downloaded from the Mano’s onboard computer.

No one knows exactly where the two ships went down so this years expedition may not be successful, but even if it is not successful, it will rule out at least one section of the Arctic for future trips. If the trip is successful and one or both ships are found, this is just the beginning of the exploration.

Once the ships are located by sonar, another expedition will set out to get actual footage of the ship or ships using another type of submersible equipped with a camera. The final step will include sending divers down to the wrecks for a closer look.

Best of luck to the researchers. May seas be calm and the wind always at their back.



The above photograph is of:

UVic Research Team
A team of UVic researchers are traveling to the arctic this summer to help Parks Canada locate Sir John Franklin’s lost ships. Pictured from front to back are UVic research engineers Emmett Gamroth, Alison Proctor and Jeff Kennedy.
Photo by: UVic/Bluefin

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Fish go to the ISS

The unmanned Japanese cargo ship, Kounotori3, delivered a freshwater aquarium to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday. The Aquarium known as the “Aquatic Habitat” or AQH for short, was built by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). A number of studies will be conducted on the Medaka (Oryzias latipes) fish it contains.

NASA and JAXA report that several of the studies to be conducted on the fish like “the impacts of radiation, bone degradation, muscle atrophy, and developmental biology” may lead to better understanding of human health issues back on earth.



"We think studies on bone degradation mechanisms and muscle atrophy mechanisms are applicable to human health problems, especially for the aging society," said Nobuyoshi Fujimoto, associate senior engineer at JAXA’s Space Environment Unitization Center.

According to Gizmag, the AQH actually has two chambers and has an advanced life support system that will circulate water, remove waste, and maintain constant pressure and temperature. The system even feeds the fish so the astronauts only need to watch the fish.


“In order to keep water quality in good condition for the health of the fish, we had to do many tests on the filtration system, especially the bacteria filter," said Nobuyoshi Fujimoto, associate senior engineer at JAXA’s Space Environment Unitization Center. "The special bacteria filter purifies waste materials, such as ammonia, so that we can keep fish for up to 90 days. This capability will make it possible for egg-to-egg breeding aboard station, which means up to three generations may be born in orbit. This would be a first for fish in space."

The Medaka fish is found in rice paddies in Japan. The fish and their eggs are transparent which makes studying the effects of zero gravity much easier. The experiment will take 90 days. Within that time frame it is anticipated that the fish will breed and the eggs will hatch. The genome of the fish has been mapped which will make it easy to tell if there is any genetic variation due to conditions in space.

The AQH is actually very versatile. While it is starting out as an aquarium, it can also be used as an amphibian habitat. For the foreseeable future, it will only be used to study fish. Amphibian experiments will be much further down the road.

Fish have previously been to space in rockets but never on the space station. This 90 day sojourn will be the longest fish in space study conducted. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”



Above photograph from NASA: The above image shows an Aquatic Habitat, or AQH, specimen chamber housing Medaka fish for study. (JAXA)

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CERN discovers an illusive “Higgslike” particle

In 1964 six physicists including Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, Tom Kibble of Imperial College,

London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; Dr. Guralnik of Brown University; and François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles developed the theory of the Higgs bosun. The Higgs bosun was conceived as a “manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass.” But until now no one has been able to show that it really existed.

According to The New York Times scientists at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) have finally discovered a Higgslike particle using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Two teams each comprised of about 3,000 physicists, crunched data from experiments conducted in the LHC and came up with the same particle.


The Atlas team was lead by led by Fabiola Gianotti, the spokes person and coordinator of the experiment. According to CNN, she was democratically elected to that position by the scientists involved.


“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

The spokes person for the second team was Joe Incandela, a physicist of the University of California, Santa Barbara.


"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

According to CERN: “One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, 3 sigma counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery.” So the fact that both groups reached a 5-sigma result is significant.

While there is still more data to analyze and more experiments to be conducted to determine the precise nature of the particle. For now however, this discovery appears to prove the Standard Model of particle physics. For over forty years, people have been theorizing that the Higgs bosun was an essential ingredient in the model and at least preliminarily, it has been shown to exist.

Now they have to figure out if it is behaving as the Standard Model predicts or is something different occurring? More experiments are needed but for now, for give particle physicists if they decide to party on this news. It isn’t often that elusive particles like the Higgslike particle just discovered are found

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