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September 26, 2005
Space elevator
I briefly blogged about space elevators back in March 2003. One of the companies I mentioned, HighLift Systems, a Seattle-based space elevator technology research company, is intimately linked with the commercial arm, LiftPort Group. Anyway, the LiftPort people successfully tested part of their technology on September 20 using a balloon to produce tension in part of the space elevator ribbon so that an early model of the lifting robot could climb to 1,000 ft. But what caught my eye from the staff blog was this:
I wasn’t involved in activities like making the ribbon. So it wasn’t until I was watching the video that I noticed the sentence written in block letters on the 2-inch wide ribbon (which alternates color in 50-foot strips of bright yellow and fluorescent orange) near the top:ATTENTION PILOT: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOTALLY SCREWED.
Posted by daen at September 26, 2005 01:02 AM