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NASA Unveils Centennial Challenges
wonderfesten writes "NASA has finally got its Centennial Challenges program off the ground. Like the X Prize, the Challenges award cash prizes to private inventors who come up with solutions to problems. The first challenges are to design a light-weight, ultra-strength tether and a means of transmitting power wirelessly. But with a prize of just $50,000, will anyone give it a shot?" Details also available on MSNBC and Space.com.
Indeed. Just use induction
Wireless power -- first conceptualized (correct me if I'm wrong) in a short story, science fiction piece by Theodore Sturgeon in his 1941 publication"Microcosmic God." I read it in high school and it has been one of the most endearing scifi works I've read....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Congress currently limits NASA to awarding prizes of $250,000 or less. The space agency is lobbying lawmakers for the authority to increase the limit to as much as $40 million. That would allow the Centennial Challenges program to set up competitions for more-advanced projects, like a human orbital flight.
The longer the government stays involved in NASA, the less the chances of NASA having successful missions and regaining achievement through innovation and daring. As long as Congress holds the reigns (and the pursestrings), NASA will be hampered by inefficient bureaucracy and meddling from unqualified naysayers. The XPrize is proof that it's time for government to exit this area of scientific examination and for philanthropists and concerned businesses to take control.
Just my $0.02, not counting inflation or exchange rates
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
-----
Michael Braukus
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-1979)
Metzada Shelef
Spaceward Foundation, Mountain View, Calif.
(Phone: 650/969-2010)
March 23, 2005
RELEASE: M05-083
NASA Announces First Centennial Challenges' Prizes
NASA and its partner, the Spaceward Foundation, today announced prizes totaling $400,000 for four prize competitions, the first under the agency's Centennial Challenges program.
NASA's Centennial Challenges promotes technical innovation through a novel program of prize competitions. It is designed to tap the nation's ingenuity to make revolutionary advances to support the Vision for Space Exploration and NASA goals. The first two competitions will focus on the development of lightweight yet strong tether materials (Tether Challenge) and wireless power transmission technologies (Beam Power Challenge).
"For more than 200 years, prizes have played a key role in spurring new achievements in science, technology, engineering and exploration," said NASA's Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Craig Steidle. "Centennial Challenges will use prizes to help make the Vision for Space Exploration a reality," he added.
"This is an exciting start for the Centennial Challenges program," said Brant Sponberg, program manager for Centennial Challenges. "The innovations from these competitions will help support advances in aerospace materials and structures, new approaches to robotic and human planetary surface operations, and even futuristic concepts like space elevators and solar power satellites," he said.
The Tether Challenge centers on the creation of a material that combines light weight and incredible strength. Under this challenge, teams will develop high strength materials that will be stretched in a head-to-head competition to see which tether is strongest.
The Beam Power challenge focuses on the development of wireless power technologies for a wide range of exploration purposes, such as human lunar exploration and long-duration Mars reconnaissance. In this challenge, teams will develop wireless power transmission systems, including transmitters and receivers, to power robotic climbers to lift the greatest weight possible to the top of a 50-meter cable in under three minutes.
The winners of each initial 2005 challenge will receive $50,000. A second set of Tether and Beam Power challenges in 2006 are more technically challenging. Each challenge will award purses of $100,000, $40,000, and $10,000 for first, second, and third place.
"We are thrilled with our partnership with NASA and we're excited to take the Tether and Beam Power challenges to the next level," said Meekk Shelef, president of the Spaceward Foundation.
The Centennial Challenges program is managed by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. The Spaceward Foundation is a public-funds non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the cause of space access in educational curriculums and the public.
For more information about the Challenges on the Internet, visit:
- http://centennialchallenges.nasa.gov
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit:http://www.spaceward.org
- end -
Too bad they weren't doing this in Tesla's day.
What's 'spaceaward'? "The Spaceward Foundation is a public-funds non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the cause of space access in educational curriculums and the public." [found in NASA's press release: M05-083]
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Previous posters... sheesh. from TFA, we see that you need to beam power to a robot climbing a cable, being judged by the amount the robot is able to carry while going. Batteries and LCRs are probably out. They suggest directed microwave or similar, if any of you are interested.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
We don't use it nowadays because it is not "merchantable" - there still is no efficient way to prevent leeching, unpaid use of it. Besides, I am not sure about this, but perhaps his machines needed to work with longwave radio frequencies to accomplish standing waves in concentric double sphere ground-ionosphere resonator. His work on wireless power transmission seems only remotely related to our radio of today
Microwave power transmission is not a figment of Maxis' imagination, incidently. According to Wikipedia, NASA did research on it during the 1970s and early 80s. Here's another entry mentioning it.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
or is this another case of space age pen vs pencil
Hey, NASA used pencils as well. Pens are just better in that conductive fragments don't break off as easily. Also, NASA payed the normal retail price for the pens. The company that developed them did so for marketting purposes. They knew they could sell a lot of space pens by linking them to the space programme even though 99.999% of their customers would never use them in zero gravity.
Just thought I should clarify. It's a bit of an urban legend and it comes up often.
Done
Thank you for posting the real link for this story.
To everyone who is positing various ways of transmitting power wirelessly, they already have a method in mind:
Showcasing the first representative prototypes of Space Elevator climbers, this event will re-define public perception of the Space Elevator project by taking the first step away from mathematical models and drawing boards and into the world of real working hardware. By participating, you get the opportunity to partner in writing this unique chapter of history.
The competition provides the race track, in the form of a crane-suspended vertical ribbon, and a strong light source to power the climbers. Competing teams provide climbers, which have to use the power beamed to them and scale the ribbon while carrying some amount of payload. Climbers will be rated according to their speed and the amount of payload they carried.
The climbers (unmanned, of course) will weigh 25-50 kg [50-100 lbs], and will ascend the ribbon at about 1 m/s. [3 feet per second or 2.5 MPH]
The beam source is a 10 kWatt Xenon search-light (80 cm beam diameter, about 25% efficient), which should yield a climber power budget of about 500 watts.
The ribbon is roughly 30cm (1 foot) wide by 1 mm thick, is about 60m (200 feet) long, and is tensioned to about 1 ton.
Building a climber is not an easy task. The designers have to juggle light weight structure, efficient photo-voltaic arrays, efficient motors and power electronics, low-loss traction mechanism, thermal management, and control systems.
Not a walk in the park, but we'll make it worth your while. We will be offering $50,000, $20,000 and $10,000 to the 3 best teams.
link:click here
The competition rules are at the bottom (pdf). Frankly, this sounds more like a college/high school technology building competition than an X-prize.
The first person to wirelessly transmit power, Nikola Tesla, demonstrated such a feat before 1900. The wireless transmission of power is simply the tranmitting of electromagnetic energy. The process is very inefficient at high energy and it is likely that NASA simply wants a more efficient way to do so.
From TFA:
Winners of those challenges would receive prizes of $100,000, $40,000 and $10,000 for first, second and third places.
Congress currently limits NASA to awarding prizes of $250,000 or less. The space agency is lobbying lawmakers for the authority to increase the limit to as much as $40 million
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
perhaps because it won't work....
A space elevator/ground to orbit tether is really a misnomer.
It is actually a 120,000 KM long satalite that is in orbit around the planet. It just happens to orbit once per day.
This is an incredibaly delicate system. THe mass has to be exactly balanced or your cable will get out of sync and start dragging on the ground...taking out cities in the process.
The only way it COULD work is if you had a double cable attached at the peak...so each cable is long enough to reach the ground by itself. Then as you move your payloads around it should stay balanced...the downside is you have to find a place to store the 120,000+ KM of cable on the ground.
A realistic model is having a standard cable that holds the weight and having a 2nd cable that is used as a pully. This could be powered at the peak as you suggested.
THe downside is that the pully system uses up payload capacity and we are already running close to max with current materials...even if we could manufacture 120,000 kM nanotube cables.
The problem is, it's not very efficient, at all. It makes power beaming by laser look efficient by comparison. Dr. Bradley Edwards considered it when doing space elevator design, and came up with a best-case number of around 0.05% for total system efficiency.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
The cable is pulled tight by the satelite wanting to fly off into space. It's a bit beyond geostationary orbit, so it isn't actually orbiting in the conventional way.
Not quite....
Based on orbital dynamics:
1. A single structure will orbit at the speed of it's center of mass.
2. Only thoes objects that orbit at geosync. orbit (about 23K KM on earth) will remain over the same spot.
3. Long object will orient in a radial manner through the center of mass of the parent object.
THEREFORE:
The cable is not held in place by the counter weight. The cable is kept taught by the counter weight. However most of the tension in the cable comes from the mass of the cable rather than the counter weight.
The cable's center of mass absolutly HAS to be at geo-sync orbit or the cable will move away from the base station.
Now as per the grandparent's original proposal...
I see what you are saying and it could in theory work...
THe problem is the cable will weigh gigatons. It will take an extremely large amount of energy to get it moving and stop it if there are any problems. There will be large amounts of enery lost as it moves through the atmosphere which will cause massive heat buildup and electrical discarge. This will cause excess tension on the already strained cable lowering effective carrying capacity.
Plus the big one....the two sides of the cable will want to move toegther. So you will have to build a counter weight which can prevent the gigatons of mass from coming together...and have this system in a fairly small space...a few hundred feet max.
The idea of a counter weight to assist in lifting/lowering is an important one. It will dramatically lower costs and help maintain the cables center of mass. However turning the whole cable into a huge rotating band is far less efficient and would not be as usefull as a much similer system.
I submitted this story a couple of times yesterday, but it sadly wasn't accepted. Maybe it was too long or had too many links? In any case, here's a copy, which has a little additional info:
MSNBC, Space.com, and Wired report that NASA, in collaboration with the non-profit Spaceward Foundation, has announced its first two Centennial Challenges. The Centennial Challenges, inspired by the Ansari X Prize and DARPA Grand Challenge, are prize contests seeking to stimulate private industry development of technologies relevant to space exploration. One contest is the Tether Challenge, for building the sort of super-strong tether needed to make a space elevator feasible. The other is the Beam Power Challenge, for creating a wirelessly-powered ribbon-climbing robot capable of lifting as large a payload as possible within a limited timeframe. The initial set of challenges in 2005 will award $50K to the winners of each contest. A second set of challenges in 2006 will award first, second, and third place prizes worth $100K, $40K, and $10K. It's hoped that these contests will further space elevator technology and help eliminate the 'giggle factor' surrounding them. Additional contests will be announced in the coming weeks, although Congress currently restricts NASA from awarding prizes of more than $250K; the agency is lobbying to try to get this limit raised to $40 million for future prizes.