One of the nice things about Near Infra-Red light is that it gets picked up by regular cameras, showing up as some combination of colors, unique to each camera. In the case of my camera, it shows up as this pink-purple hue. To the naked eye, the climber seems unlit.
For more videos from this test session, check out the Space Elevator Blog (”There’s cool, and then there’s Über-Cool”), especially the last video, where Ted’s Maniacal laughter reveals his true nefarious character – who knew.
(The test was conducted at TRUMPF’s facilities in Detroit – they make the cool lasers that put your car together.)






For the obvious reasons, I invariably get too busy to blog exactly when things get interesting...