Meet the Team: Carsten Erickson

Written by Tom Nugent on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

Next in our “Meet the Team” series of posts is Carsten Erickson.

Carsten is the owner of Coolearth Software, which provides Supply Chain Execution and warehouse management software to food and beverage manufactures across North America. Carsten co-founded the company 10 years ago and has been growing it one customer at a time since then. When he’s not flying across the country on business, Carsten and the rest of the Coolearth team are developing for LaserMotive a computer vision system that tracks our vehicle as it moves up the ribbon, as well as some other automated elements of our system.

We found Carsten thanks to David Shoemaker (who we’ll introduce in a later post) attending a Seattle Robotics Society meeting. David was presenting about the space elevator concept in general, and at the end of his talk he issued a call for people that might be interested in starting a team to compete in the NASA / Spaceward contest. Carsten and his family have been involved in racing of one type or another, Go-Kart, Hydro, Vintage Sports Car, for his entire life and thought it would be a fun and an important event to participate in. Little did Carsten know what he’d get into upon attending his very first SRS meeting!

Carsten says he sees the competition as a chance to push available technology a bit further, and potentially provide new power beaming applications both here on earth and in space. But like all of us, I think he’s also motivated by just cool the whole competition is!