Queen's Space Engineering Team

Congratulations to Justin Charbonneau, Max Millar-Blanchaer, Jason Saldanha, and Cameron Hurst, who will be filling the executive positions for this year's design team! Thank you to all those who applied and we hope you will join the QSET design team.

The first general meeting will be held on Saturday, April 5th from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in Stirling Hall in Auditorium A.

The Queen’s Space Engineering Team is currently the fastest growing and most advanced competitive engineering team at Queen's University.  Participating in annual competitions sponsored by NASA, QSET strives to push the limits of wireless power beaming and high efficiency design.  At the upcoming 2008 Power Beaming Challenge, QSET will face teams comprised of both university students as well as experienced professionals for $2,000,000 USD in prizes, requiring cutting edge technology and a high degree of professionalism.  The games are organized by the Spaceward Foundation and receive support from NASA as part of their Centennial Challenges. NASA’s support of the event demonstrates the crucial role this competition plays in stimulating interest and innovation within the space industry.

Visit the Space Elevator Blog for progress updates on the Power Beaming Challenge and the competitive teams.

Presently, everything from satellites to supplies for the space station must be carried by a rocket in order to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. While rocket technology has allowed the human race do remarkable things in the past century, it is cost prohibitive.  In fact, the cost to put anything into geosynchronous orbit is between $20,000 and $80,000 per kilogram. Furthermore, rockets cannot carry a payload into space which exceeds 10% of the total mass of the rocket, making large scale projects difficult and costly.

The creation of a space elevator promises to provide a more economical means to transport materials into orbit. In contrast to the high cost of rocket technology, current forecasts place the cost of transporting materials via a space elevator at $220 per kilogram. Thus, even if the predicted figures are off by a factor of ten, a functional space elevator would revolutionize the space industry forever, making it a highly worthwhile endeavor.  A space elevator would allow a number of previously unfeasible projects to be carried out.   Large scale solar farms, research facilities, and human habitats that would act as a springboard from which to launch further explorations into space would all be made possible by the construction of a space elevator.  

It is helpful to picture a space elevator as behaving like a ball being swung on the end of a string in a circular motion. The string is continually pulling the ball towards the centre of the circle, while the ball’s tendency to travel in a straight line resists this pull, keeping the string taught and the ball traveling in circular motion. Similarly, the space elevator will consist of a counterweight attached to the earth via a long ribbon, or tether about 100,000 km long and the rotation of the earth will act as the “person” doing the swinging. With the tether pulled taught by the rotational force of earth, vehicles will be able to ascend the tether and reach high orbit.