October 17th, 2007
Yesterday was the first full day for us in Salt Lake City. We discovered that Spaceward, and the Space Pirates team were all staying at our hotel. Then we proceeded down to the fairgrounds in Farmington, just south of our hotel. The scenery is relaxing as the mountains line the highway. After our first team briefing meeting, we went out to assess the damage to our stuff. McGill had piled it up for us beside their station. The first thing we started on was bending our satellite dish back into place. Then I desperately hunted for the U Iowa magnetron which was not to be found. It had been thrown out of the box it was in and one of the anodes was cracked. Looks like we have to resort to the unproven backup CRC2 magnetron for now. The weather is inclement, raining briefly in the afternoon followed by thundershowers at night. With the wind, rain, and clouds, Spaceward is considering extending the contest until next Tuesday. The good news out of that is qualification deadline is extended one more day. We also built the Xbox up and are going to assemble the dish today. The McGill guys were very helpful to us, making Home Depot runs and giving a hand when we needed it.
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October 15th, 2007
At the start of this weekend, Punkworks was in good shape. McGill was going to pickup our equipment for us and haul it to Utah. We had 2 6 kW Cobers on hand, and 1 sitting in Iowa waiting to be picked up. The ideal scenario would have been one Cober shooting out at one polarization, and the second one shooting out at another polarization. The third one would have just been around for spares or another potential partnership. McGill arrived at the Brampton test site on Saturday morning 5 AM to pack up. Five members of the team were on hand to fill the trailer. Unfortunately, only one Cober was able to fit on that trailer. So we’re suddenly down to 1 Cober going to Utah. But that’s only the beginning…
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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October 10th, 2007
This year, Punkworks has focussed on developing the beam-power technology. It has been a tremendous journey for our team preparing for the competition. We are partnering with McGill University to compete in the Space Elevator Games to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah from Oct. 19-21.
Here’s a snapshot of our wares
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June 9th, 2007
Punkworks is proud to announce that we will be performing a beam testing experiment this month. The team is gearing up and readying the microwave equipment for a half-power test at our new Toronto headquarters. We will be assessing how much power is being transmitted to our rectenna at the 100 meter mark. This beam test will be an important milestone for our team and as soon as the beam tests have been completed, we will post our results on this website. So stay tuned! Also on the Punkworks’ ‘to-do’ list is the redesign of Jack’s roller assembly for faster mounting and dismounting. This task will fall on the new mechanical design team.
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.
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December 5th, 2006
Allen from Punkworks visited the headquarters of Team White Pine, who is competing in the National Lego Robot Competition on Saturday, Dec. 9. He gave them advice on how to run a skit related to how the space elevator will operate in the future. These kids are really talented, and have so much support from their families. We wish them the best of luck in the competition and hopefully, they make it to the world competition in Atlanta.
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October 22nd, 2006
Spaceward extended the competition an entire day so that the two microwave teams had a chance to compete. But they also included other teams that wanted to use up all of their runs on the tether. However, the tether wasn’t up until 11:30 AM, and our generator didn’t get there until 1 PM, so we were behind the 8-ball already. We were told by Spaceward and NASA that we were to go last. Space Pirates went first, followed by Starclimber, USST, Lightwon, Centaurus, and then us. None of them were able to get up the tether due to the fierce wind. All teams had a half hour to set up their climbers, but we thought that was only to give us more time on the tether considering we hadn’t had a full opportunity yet. During the day, Allen found that the 9 V batteries were draining much more quickly with the new stronger solenoid than before. Both Allen and Rajesh worked on reprogramming the controller, while Mariusz rewired the batteries to accommodate the extra power. Mariusz had to leave at 1 PM to catch his flight back home so only Aman, Kevin, Allen and Erwin were there for our qualifying run.
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.
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October 21st, 2006
We were awakened by Ben and told to arrive at the airport at 6am. When we got there we found out that the airport officials didn’t allow us to use microwaves due to communications interference. This despite the fact they agreed to allow microwaves to Spaceward several months before. Spaceward then promised that we would qualify later that night at the fairgrounds. So we setup our exhibit on Climber Row at the X-Prize Cup and had Jack on display to answer questions. I was at the media tent to generate interest in our team and let the media know that the Space Elevator challenge was to continue tonight and possibly tomorrow. We all took turns at the booth and walking around to take in the sights and sounds of the X-Prize Cup. The rocket launches and lunar landing competitions were the most exciting things to watch. Athan and I met the founders of Google and Google Earth, Peter Diamandis (from X-Prize Cup), Anousha Ansari (first female space tourist) and Richard Branson. On Friday Kevin and I saw Buzz Aldrin speak as well as waved to him as he was leaving in his car.
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.
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