Dear Friend,

I left last months President's Corner with.... "See you at the conference, I hope!"  Well, I was especially pleased with the remarkable turnout and overwhelming content of the presentations.  We had some great conversations, in depth presentations, mini-workshops with brainstorming, discussions over dinner and drinks, and networking with "like-thinking" attendees.  Indeed, the issues across the space elevator spectrum were addressed and incrementally moved towards better understandings.  I was surprised and delighted with the progress in three areas:

1. The Marine Node discussions moved from a relatively sedate topic to one of mysterious dimensions - This topic was chosen as ISEC's principle 2015 theme, with a year long study and published report.  The topic was addressed in a workshop, with creative ideas surfacing, leading to a new image of multi-dimensional Marine Nodes full of robustness.


2. The initiation of a fun contest entitled "The Elevator Speech," brought a breath of fresh air.  Imagine - you are in an elevator with an influential person and you have 90 seconds to sell the space elevator - how do you phrase it for complete understanding AND buy-in of your listener.  The fun part was two high school students excelled and took the prizes.


3. Oral History - Our conference has always had great people with good ideas who are passionate about space elevators.  This year, our history committee conducted oral history sessions with organized questions in a room next door to the conference.  The beauty of this effort was that all the people who attended were able to present their version of the history of space elevators in an open manner and helped ISEC understand where we all come from.  

Once again our conference was successful because of the individuals who attended, supported, and/or presented.  We had the best turnout in years with several key topics addressed in many surprising approaches.  The conference was indeed successful while accomplishing the key task of informing and stimulating curiosity towards low cost, routine access to our solar system.  

"Keep Climbing my Friends!"  Pete Swan

Three days of informative and exciting presentations, lots of new people and "old-timers", discussions before, during and after the conference hours, advancing our understanding of the Space Elevator and the ability to tour an absolutely awesome facility, Seattle's Museum of Flight - what's not to like?  And, as a bonus, the weather cooperated (Seattle's weather is usually wonderful in August and this year was no exception).

There were presentations and activities for all audiences; from 'general interest' (Living on Cloud 9: Or What We Could Do With A Lunar Space Elevator!) to more specialized (For space elevator rope: Production of exfoliated graphene and high surface charged-cellulose nanocrystals as stabilizer synthesized by lyophilized acidic hydrolysis) to family interest (the 2014 Family Science Fest and Robotics Competition).

Noted science author Leonard David gave the Keynote speech on how the Space Elevator fits into the current space paradigm and he wound up his presentation with a very memorable quote: "Prepare to be stunned by the future!"

There were also three Mini-Workshops; Research Activities and Global Cooperation, Marine Node Design Concepts and Space Elevator Architectures and Roadmaps.  The last two concentrated on the ISEC 2014 and 2015 Themes and will be the basis for the reports being created on these topics.  These reports will be added to ISEC's ever growing library of specialized space elevator reports.

Several people from the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) attended and, in addition to presenting on the current activities of JSEA, they also made a proposal to ISEC - to help them turn their robotic climber competition into an international event.  JSEA has hosted this competition for the past several years and, except for the inclusion of one team from Germany, it's been an all-Japan event.  A similar event has also been hosted once or twice in Europe over the past few years, but since the ending of the NASA/Spaceward Space Elevator Games, there has been no comparable competition in the US.  JSEA wants to change that, turning their competition into a truly international event.  There was a very favorable response to this from ISEC and the conference audience and now we're looking for a 'champion' to run or assist in the running of this event.  If you are interested, please contact ISEC President Dr. Peter Swan (pete.swan@isec.org) and let him know.

For a more detailed description and summary and each of the presentations, please visit the Space Elevator Blog which live-blogged the event.  There are pictures of the event on the Space Elevator Blog and even more on our Flickr account.

Everyone who attended enjoyed it very much and many are already making plans to be at next year's conference (which will almost certainly be in late August at the same venue).  We hope to see you there!

(The picture thumbnail is of the Elevator Speech winners, Lana and Campbell Gorlinski, holding their prizes, Amazon gift cards.  They are standing in front of most of the conference attendees.  This issues "President's Corner" talks about the Elevator Speech competition, something which is sure to become a fixture at future conferences.  Clicking on the photo will display a larger size version of the picture.)