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NASA expected to announce LaserMotive as winner of $900,000 price

One of the proposed methods for getting payloads and people into space at a lower cost is via a method that sounds like science fiction: the space elevator. The prospect of an elevator that takes cargo into space may sound like fiction, but NASA is investing heavily into research to fund the project.

NASA has been holding an annual competition to find robotic technology that can be powered wirelessly to enable a robotic climber to ascend the cable that would be used for the space elevator. The elevator would consist of a cable that would need to be anchored at the equator and deployed thousands of kilometers into space. The cable would be kept taunt by the centrifugal force of the Earth as it spins.

The NASA competition is called the Power Beaming Challenge. The challenge requires robotic climbers to scale the cable that are powered from the ground. The total prize money put up for the competition is $2 million set to be handed out in two increments. The first would go to any robotic crawler that was able to ascend a 900 meter cable that was suspended from a helicopter at a speed of faster than 2 meters per second.

The money set aside for this feat was $900,000. The larger portion of the money totaling $1.1 million would be given to the team whose crawler could ascend the cable to the top at speeds over five meters per second.

The most recent competition was held and a team called LaserMotive was able to ascend the full 900 meter cable length at a speed of 3.7 meters per second, claiming the $900,000 prize. The next day the LaserMotive team was able to fully ascend the cable at a faster speed of 3.9 meters per second, well short of the 5 meter per second mark to claim the remaining $1.1 million in prize money. LaserMotive was the only team out of the three competing that was able to fully scale the cable.

Other methods of powering the climbers are also being studied including rhythmic jerking.


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Uh...
By amanojaku on 11/9/2009 11:36:14 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
Other methods of propulsion for climbers are also being studied including rhythmic jerking .
There are so many things wrong with this statement...




RE: Uh...
By ussfletcher on 11/9/2009 12:12:02 PM , Rating: 4
Joking aside, there are so many things wrong with this article. Please don't just rely on the spell checker anymore.


RE: Uh...
By MrBlastman on 11/9/2009 12:40:45 PM , Rating: 2
Gives new meaning to the phrase:

"Beating your enemy into space." :-|


RE: Uh...
By napalmjack on 11/9/2009 12:48:12 PM , Rating: 2
How about...

"LaserMotive Beats Off Challengers in Space Elevator Contest"


RE: Uh...
By sciwizam on 11/9/2009 1:29:05 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
How about...

"LaserMotive Beats Off Challengers in Space Elevator Contest"


"LaserMotive Beats Off Challengers in Space Elevator Contest using rhythmic jerking"


RE: Uh...
By BikeDude on 11/10/2009 5:57:52 AM , Rating: 2
"LaserMotive has the upper hand -- rhytmic jerking next"


Passing over the obvious joke
By ThePooBurner on 11/9/2009 5:12:31 PM , Rating: 1
I was going to joke about the jerking to, but i have a different thought based on reading the comments in the article it linked to.

All of the research is being done based on the idea of a cable that goes straight and is kept that way via geo sync orbit.

What if instead we put the counter weight a bit farther out allow for a "dragged" orbit where the cable goes up into space at an angle so you basically just have to drive into space. Much easier than going straight up.




RE: Passing over the obvious joke
By JediJeb on 11/9/2009 6:02:59 PM , Rating: 2
Might work but you will need longer cable, which is more weight, and you change the stress loading on the cable and climber.


By ThePooBurner on 11/10/2009 1:57:35 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, but if we are talking about making a cable that is 10's of thousands of miles long, what is another couple thousand? :)


RE: Passing over the obvious joke
By georges1977 on 11/9/2009 10:30:41 PM , Rating: 2
"Dragged" by what?

imho a longer cable would just go straight out further. No additional air resistance as you get further out into space... :-)


By ThePooBurner on 11/10/2009 2:03:43 PM , Rating: 2
It was mentioned in the comments of the other article that if you put more weight at the end of the rope (like a lot more) it causes it to orbit just a bit slower than normal (or at least that is what the sentence implied), so rather than being in geo sync it would be in a "just behind" due to the rotational speed of the earth not being enough to swinging it out into geo sync. Essentially the earth would be pulling it "over it's shoulder" rather than "hammer throwing" it.


Impressive
By Redwin on 11/9/2009 11:38:58 AM , Rating: 2
Honestly, I didn't think they'd get up to those speeds using laser power this quickly.

Obviously there's a mind bogglingly large amount of work to be done before they can contemplate designing a space elevator, but 3.7 m/s against gravity using only a laser beam as power is better than I would have expected.

I wonder if they've given any thought to the problem of the laser attenuating in the atmosphere as it goes higher; seems to me that would be the biggest problem with ground-based laser power for the climber. (real space elevators won't stop at 1km, obviously)




RE: Impressive
By Glix on 11/9/2009 11:52:17 AM , Rating: 2
Maybe they could switch to solar power once high enough up?


RE: Impressive
By Redwin on 11/9/2009 12:24:24 PM , Rating: 2
Well, I think avoiding the extra weight of solar panels and such is probably part of the reason they want to use a laser in the first place (although here they ARE essentially still shooting the laser at a photovoltaic "solar panel", its a tiny one to collect high energy laser light, you'd need a surface area many times bigger to get the same energy out of unfocused sunlight)

But you have a great point in that solar power in space is much more intense than on the ground, so perhaps what you'd do is once it gets too high to power well from the ground, you start shooting a solar-powered laser DOWN at it from the top, where collecting solar energy would be easy, and the laser would not experience much attenuation since its traveling mostly through space.


Go LaserMotive!
By Creig on 11/9/2009 11:51:00 AM , Rating: 3
As most people here already know, during a speech he once gave, someone in the audience asked Arthur C. Clarke when the space elevator would become a reality.

Clarke answered, "Probably about 50 years after everybody quits laughing".

Well, they're never going to quit laughing if the engineers have to include the term "rhythmic jerking" every time they're explaining how it's supposed to work.




RE: Go LaserMotive!
By brundall on 11/9/2009 3:34:24 PM , Rating: 2
Although rythmic jerking is infinitely more preferable to the closely related circle jerk.


maybe i am missing something
By invidious on 11/9/2009 2:13:40 PM , Rating: 2
Is there a reason why the cable couldnt carry electrical wires?




By AyashiKaibutsu on 11/9/2009 2:23:19 PM , Rating: 2
Probably has to do with not having materials that will hold up to their own weight as it is yet alone carry electrical wires with it.


Materials?
By jesman0 on 11/13/2009 3:37:40 PM , Rating: 2
I'd simply like to know what kind of material could be strong enough to resist the stresses of being flung around in space at a 1600kph and over 350km long.




Just for the laughs
By chaos7 on 11/9/2009 11:34:18 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
Other methods of propulsion for climbers are also being studied including rhythmic jerking.


This last sentence must have been put in just for the laughs.




RE: Just for the laughs
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 11/9/09, Rating: 0
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates











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