I’m thrilled to announce that I’m up for two Aurora Awards this year! Fireboy is on the ballot for Best Young Adult Novel, and The Worldshapers is once again on the ballot for Best Fan …
I spent a good chunk of today at Wordbridge, the annual writers’ conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. My main reason for coming was to launch a Shadowpaw Press title (Broken Realm by Jenna Greene, a Lethbridge …
This is Easter weekend; last weekend, I sang in the Easter concert of First Baptist Church here in Regina as a guest soloist and chorister. The whole concert is worth listening to, but if you’d …
I put a link to this in the previous post on my Aurora-eligible work for 2025, but wanted to highlight it. This was my contribution to the Shapers of Worlds Volume V anthology, and it …
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s best-known science fiction and fantasy awards, voted on by fans every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to win twice, for Marseguro (DAW Books) (soon coming out in a new edition from Tuscany …
Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
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University of Saskatchewan team sets space elevator record
No one won either of the $50,000 prizes in a NASA competition designed to lay the groundwork for space elevators–but a team from our very own University of Saskatchewan built a robot that managed to climb the highest, 12 metres, up a 61-metre cable using photoelectric cells to convert radiation from an industrial searchlight into electricity. They didn’t win the Beam Power Challenge prize because they they didn’t manage to maintain an average speed of one metre per second.
Nevertheless, way to go, Huskies!
This year, teams were limited to using the NASA-provided searchlight as power; next year, they can provide whatever source of beam power they want.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2005/10/university-of-saskatchewan-team-sets-space-elevator-record/
