On behalf of the members of USST, I want to send my utmost thanks to you for your support this summer. Your help led us to our third consecutive first place finish in NASA’s Elevator 2010 competition, held in Salt Lake City from Oct 13th – 22nd. We beat out 28 teams from seven countries that originally signed up for the 2007 competition and, in doing so, restored our role as the world leader in space elevator and power beaming technology.

Here is a quick summary of the competition:

• We finished in first place having the best performance for the third year in a row.

• We again narrowly missed winning the prize money. Only 0.2 m/s short of the $500,000 prize.

• We set three competition records which are also currently considered world records. They are as follows:

      o The first ever laser powered climb,

      o The highest ever laser powered climb ,

      o The fastest ever laser powered climb.

• We also set the world record for the largest amount of wireless energy ever transferred using a laser. The most up until now was about 2 watts of mechanical energy. We transferred around 400 watts into mechanical energy.

• Despite the (100 meter) ribbon breaking during one of our runs, our climber survived and was not damaged.

• We were invited to speak and have just returned from three prestigious Aerospace Conferences. They were held in Luxembourg City - Luxembourg, Kona - Hawaii and Calgary - Alberta. They were all back to back and were held from November 8th – 18th. They were sponsored by Euro Spaceward the U.S. Air force and the Canadian Space Society.

Our web site is in the process of being updated with the media exposure and visuals from the competition. I have included a link of a Discovery Channel interview we had before we left for the conferences.

Sincerely,
Clayton Ruszkowski
President
U of S Space Design Team