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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.
Transmitting power wirelessly is easy. Every signal, be it from a radio station, wifi, a cell phone or whatever, is a transmission of power.
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The first challenges are to design a light-weight, ultra-strength tether and a means of transmitting power wirelessly.
:)
This has "space elevator" all written over.
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I think whoever can solve any of those problems can licence the invention for a lot more money! Or is this the new form of OSS (Open Source Science)
The early posts (and the submitter) seem to be missing the point... The $50k reward is just that - a reward. It's not like with the X Prize that the reward covered development costs. It's just an incentive - the *real* reward comes after you win. That's when you secure licensing deals, like Rutan did with Virgin.
The difficulty with a thunder system is the problems and threats it poses to other things in this world. That thunder would be generating an enormous amount of EM Interference, thus making radio transmissions very difficult.
Plus, for widespread use, there would have to be control measures in place in order to avoid innocent people getting 10000VAC arcs onto their left asscheek. On the upside though, cities could entirely phase out street lights with a thunder system.
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Today, good ir lasers can get 60% wallplug efficiency (>99% quantum efficency and little outcoupling losses, plus little additional resistances adding to the bandgap).
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The main reason why solar cells are unefficient is that you have to gamble with the bandgap: set it too high, and you will lose to many low energy photons. set it too low, and all those high energy photons will lose all energy >E_gap as phonons/heat. So even an absolutely ideal Solar cell could only get a little over 25% or so efficiency with a backbody spectrum.
But now take a laser and create a optimally tuned solar cell with a bandgap just a bit lower than the laser wavelenght. You should be able to get 20-30% total transmission efficiency at least, imho, after a little optimisation.
That doesnt sound too good, but its not so bad compared to other ways to store and carry energy (batteries, ect).
But of course, having solar power stations in orbit that beam down their power with lasers would make a lot of people very nervous, for very good reasons
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This could actually work against research in those areas. No one will come up with better prize money, since NASA already tagged it. Instead, there will be X-Prizes in other fields of research.
It's an incredibly smart way of paying for research though. This way NASA won't spend more than $50k on major discoveries.
What? Maybe I'm picking a fight with the wrong libertarian but...
Do you honestly think we would have had an orbital space flight, much less a trip to the moon without government involvement in NASA?
Let's look at the major players in space - yep, USA, USSR, and now to some extent China. No government involvement in any of those!
It's great to pull the government out of places where private industry can do better but are you sure private industry can do it better than the government now?
I don't think private industry will be pleased enough with the possible ROI to do much - heck, our first private group finally got a plane to touch the edge of the atmosphere. That was also spurred by cash prize. That's not the way to make private industry invest - they want a way to make money.
There aren't enough "concerned businesses" and "philanthropists" to make up for the cash flow that NASA would lose without public funding.
Bush recently got an additional 80 billion for his wars, while NASA has to struggle not to get their already ridiculously low funding slashed. Humankind is truly marvellous.
I think they are trying to go the "you get free publicity" route, sort of like X-Prize. X-Prize entries definitely cost more than the 10 million dollars that they won. But they got a lot of free publicity and now they have a contract with Virgin for commercial service. Make a viable space tether or microwave power transfer system and we'll make you famous!
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It seems to me that questing for wireless power transmission is a waste of time. The problem with high-power microwave beams is that anything getting in the way would get cooked, same with lasers. The focus should instead be on miniaturization of power sources such as fuel cells, and maybe even miniature elementary particle power generators that harness the energy that permeates the universe on a quantum level.
Wireless power in many instances is easy but low powered. What the focus needs to be on is superconducting materials that enable us to make devices that require minimal power to function.
Imagine a watch that took your body heat and with the right chips in the watch would convert that heat and power/charge the watch.
The same could be said for any number of ways to get power somewhere. If things were ultra low powered then fiber optics could be used to power devices.
That is also a reason I think seti faces a problem. Modern civilizations may be using superconductor tech that gives them virtually no ELM footprint past their local region of space. If we do find something more likely that signal will fade and eventually dissapear over time.