No One Wins NASA Space Elevator Contest

volts writes "According to New Scientist no one was able to grab the two $50,000 top prizes in the recent NASA 'Beam Power Challenge'. The biggest limiting factor seemed to be that no team was able to meet the speed requirement, although a group from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada set the height record at 12 meters. Not quite geosynchronous..."

Re:The biggest limiting factor seemed to be...

[georgewilliamherbert]

The biggest limiting factor seemed to be that NASA didn't offer enough money to get any remotely reasonable solution to the problem. Fifty thousand dollars is chump change to the kind of money needed to develop any of this technology.

These challenges typically cost more to compete in than you can win. DARPA autonomous vehicles teams typically spent 2-3 times the prize. The X-prize was won by a team spending $26 million on a $10 million prize.

What you "win" is prestige and advancing the state of the art.

Also, at least one elevator climber team was only 3 people part-time. That's not a huge budget...

Re:Top Speed

[Ironsides]

They should set a slightly lower speed limit. This would encourage more people to work on the problem.

The minimum speed was 1 meter/s = 3.6km/h = 2.2369 miles/h. I can walk faster than that.

Geosynch is 35,786 km above sealeve according to wiki. At 3.6 km/h it would take over a year to get up to geosynch. They really should increase the minimum speed.

Geosynchronous

[ornil]

Not quite geosynchronous...

Oh, it's quite geosynchronous (i.e. above the same point on the Earth surface). It's just not in orbit.

Re:Too bad

[qbwiz]

The problem was apparently that the spotlight they were using had too diffuse of a beam. Next year, when the teams provide their own beaming systems, it might turn out better.

Re:Yeah, right...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.usask.ca/ [usask.ca]

Re:Yeah, right...

[lyedee]

Yeah, I'm going there for school next year. I can only imagine what potential (non-Canadian) employers will think when they see I have a degree from the University of Saskatchewan. It even sounds funny to me, and I've been here my whole life.

Re:Top Speed

[georgewilliamherbert]

The minimum speed was 1 meter/s = 3.6km/h = 2.2369 miles/h. I can walk faster than that. Geosynch is 35,786 km above sealeve according to wiki. At 3.6 km/h it would take over a year to get up to geosynch. They really should increase the minimum speed.

There were a number of factors arguing for slower speed initial prize goals.

Power source this time was limited to a single high-power searchlight... faster requires a whole lot more power, and it simply wasn't going to be available in time.

Most teams didn't have the chance to test at their own facility with their own searchlight, nor at the competition site. If you can't really test, you shouldn't assume highly efficient operations...

The tether in use wasn't that tall, and accellerating and decellerating a whole lot within the available vertical distance was a nonstarter.

This was a introduction to parts of the problem set, not a realistic attempt to engineer production grade tether climbers. Everyone involved knows that...

Re:Top Speed

[Judge_Fire]

e) 'Unlimited' energy that can be created on location or fed from an existing grid, instead of shipping around limited quantities of hazardous chemicals. You'll need to choose between cheap and fast, though.

j.

Re:Top Speed

[Chirs]

You've missed a major point to the space elevator scenario--controlled descent.

In a standard descent, all the excess kinetic energy is wasted as heat. In a space-elevator scenario, you can use the energy of the descending cars to assist in powering the ascending cars. Net overall energy expenditure required is just enough to start the system and overcome the inevitable inefficiencies. Your average energy-per-car can be much lower than the rocket scenario.

MagLev

[gatzke]

I always thought having the energy stored on the ground was a good idea, and just giving the rocket an initial kick to avoid the first stage.

I remember reading about the amount of energy used to get a large rocket moving from 0 to x mph. If the first stage could be provided on the ground in the form of a gun or a mag-lev push, it would shave tons off the system and be reusable. Problem is, the cargo may have to take a lot of G forces, so it may only be good for dead weight cargo.

Just like spaceship one used a mothership to get things rolling, these systems could give the initial push without burdeneng the rocket with the requisite energy storage requirements.

Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress went into this a good bit, interesting idea.

Um, anybody see the last line in this...

[hotgigs]

Why would I try to win this year when the prize money doubles for next year? "Next year, both contests will be repeated but the top prizes will rise to $100,000." Let me guess... the year after that the prize money goes to $250k? Sounds backward to me...

Re:Top Speed

[Mikkeles]

Your wish has been granted (FTA):

He adds that teams were restricted to using NASA's searchlight as the power source this year, but says they will be able to design their own in 2006. "They can use lasers, microwaves, whatever they like," he says.

Re:Top Speed

[JaredOfEuropa]

What you DO gain is:

You missed the most important gain to be had from a climber with a ground-based energy source. Guess what most of the fuel in a rocket is used for. That's right, most fuel is used to haul up the fuel used to haul up the fuel used to boost the rocket up to escape velocity. With a space elevator, all fuel goes towards lifting the actual payload and climber (minus atmospheric losses).

Forget elevators, Super Canons are the way!

[decipher_saint]

Jules Verne thought that in the future man would get to the moon by being fired there in a bullet shaped craft from a gigantic canon, and for a time afterwards many scientists agreed that the easiest way to get something into orbit would be some form of "Verne canon". Of course then you get all those wacky guys in the 20s playing around with rockets with good results. Later some Germans sped up the research into these rockets to be used as weapons of war and the development of rocket systems well, skyrocketed. Several of their best rocket scientists went to the West after WWII and development continued, though this time the focus was split between missile design and space exploration. Meanwhile, in Canada a few nutty guys were involed in a little project called the High Altitude Research Program [astronautix.com] (HARP), the idea was that payloads could simply be fired into orbit by a huge canon, mind you the payloads would be inorganic (satellites, radar chaff, other innert material, etc) because the escape velocity would be too great for living creatures to widthstand.

At the time (the 60s) people were interested in sending people into space, not to mention the Canadian Gov't no longer had interest in the project it was killed off by 1967. Now, I think the focus has changed a bit (what with successful robotic expeditions and the desire for a cheap way to get material into orbit) that the Verne Canon might once again be relevant.

ahem...

[Anonymous Coward]

You dropped this:

this Karma courtesy of Eddie Izzard, Dress To Kill (1999)

46000?????

[sconeu]

\i{I have seen suggestions that ~46,000 mph or 13 miles/sec would get you into orbit.}

Orbital velocity for LEO is about 18000 mph, or roughly 5 miles/sec.
Earth Escape Velocity is about 25000mph, or roughly 7 miles/sec.

46000mph is so far beyond what is needed for orbit, it's ridiculous.

Re:Top Speed

[Monty_Lovering]

Actually, I think we may be over-complicating it. Trains run on rails and pick their power up from another rail. If you can streach one cable to g-sync orbit, you can streach several. If the cable and orbital-station can 'stay-up' when stuff gors up or down the cable, why not have permenant stations?

Until some effective "power-beam", or practically-sized self-contained power source (maybe fusion one day) is developed, you can power capsules using good-old power-rail systems, with repeater generation stations along the length of the cable (or other adjacent cables) to off-ser power losses due to the resitance of the "power line".

And, if I am grokking this correctly, this line would be the temperature of geo-stationary orbit, or at least damn cold, and therefore super-conductors would be effective in slashing the need for repeater statations.

I wonder if there would be a pd between the top of the cable and the bottom? Free power, cool...

Arther C. CLarke wrote the definative "hard" sci-fi book on the subject, "The Fountains of Paradise" I think it was called...

Re:Lunar Space elevator?

[Lab Wizard]

A lunar space elevator isn't as simple as you might think. Given the moon's proximity to the Earth, the only stable place to deploy one is from the midpoint of the far side. Given the moon's slow rate of rotation, it's more difficult to keep the tether up. You'd need one pretty much as long as those proposed for an Earth-based space elevator.

Re:Top Speed

[Ironsides]

Even for personnel, that's on the order of time it took to sail from Europe to America via wind power, and people did that

http://www.bartleby.com/65/co/ColumbusC.html [bartleby.com]
On Aug. 3, 1492, Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa María, commanded by Columbus himself, the Pinta under Martín Pinzón, and the Niña under Vicente Yáñez Pinzón. After halting at the Canary Islands, he sailed due west from Sept. 6 until Oct. 7, when he changed his course to the southwest. On Oct. 10 a small mutiny was quelled, and on Oct. 12 he landed on a small island (Watling Island; see San Salvador) in the Bahamas.

I get 2 months and a bit over a week from that, not over 1 year.