Support the Kansas City Space Pirates!

According to a recent New York Times Magazine article, the future of space travel is going to increasingly rely on the amateur inventor and surprisingly a few of those amateurs - like local inventor/computer consultant Brian Turner - reside in Kansas City.

Turner's crew, The Kansas City Space Pirates are a group comprised of locals and nearby Midwesterners entered in the 2007 Space Elevator games climber competition.

The Space Elevator is just what it sounds like - The designs basically focus on building a 22,000-mile-high cable to transport cargo and people into space. Turner succinctly describes the competition on the Space Pirates website:

The competition is, in summary, a vertical drag race straight up 100 Meters with no fuel or batteries. The climbers are unmanned, weigh a max of 25Kg (60Lbs), and may only be power by beamed energy.

Recently, NOVA produced a documentary on the subject. The Space Elevator is billed as not only as a way to make space exploration safer but also as a means of lowering the cost and increasing the efficiency of getting cargo from Earth to space.

The local group placed pretty highly and garnered a lot of buzz during last year's competition, this quick video clip on Youtube shows their qualifying entry.



Also, the KC Space Pirates have a pretty awesome nickname for their entry into the competition which could be worth 500k to whoever wins . . . The Pirates contraption was dubbed "The Archimedes Death Ray" because it uses solar energy by harnessing the power generated by a collection of wall mirrors that are similar to those found on bathroom doors across the country.

Still, it's important to remember that science costs money and Turner and crew are furiously shilling advertising/sponsorship opportunities but they still might need your help in their fund raising efforts.

So far Turner has reportedly said that NASA isn't giving the efforts of space elevator inventors top priority but it's nice to see that Kansas City is on the cutting edge of the next generation of transportation initiatives that don't involve silly light rail schemes or those Godforsaken gondolas.