Each year, the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA)holds a Climber competition acronymed SPEC (SPace Elevator Challenge) and each year they get more and more ambitious in their goals. This year they had a 1,200 m long tether held up by balloons. Climbers are powered by batteries and scores are awarded based on speed, payload, etc.
I had blogged about this previously, but said that videos/pictures/results had not yet been posted. Now they have.
This video of the competition is very well done. About 6 minutes and 50 seconds in, there is the rather astonishing segment of 100kg of payload for one of the climbers and then subsequently watching that climber carry it part-way up the competition tether.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand Japanese, you’ll understand everything going on in the video. It’s in HD, so if you have a big screen monitor, flip the video into full-screen mode, crank up your speakers and enjoy…