Slashdot Mirror
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..."
They should set a slightly lower speed limit. This would encourage more people to work on the problem.
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.
Been done before, except with more monkey.
stack a million and your there
I'm reminded of DARPA Grand Challenge 1. This, though, seems quite a bit easier than autonomous vehicles- perhaps not the tether, but the climbers seem straighforeward. Are solar panels really that heavy? Are they that inefficient? The article says there was only a six-month time period between the contest announcement and the contest, but there isn't much in the way of new technology needed here. What gives?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
I think it has more of a chance of working than you. How's the view from the family basement, junior? The thing that people fail to realize is that even if a project never reaches its goal, it has the potential to spawn innovation that can be applied to other problems. There is a quite a list of things that are NASA castoffs that are used in everyday life.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
No one ever said it would be feasible or easy.
Just as the first rockets blew up in the inventors faces, and many many failed, the work on them progressed until now we can mass manufacture them with very high success rates.
Have to start somewhere.. and from what i've seen.. this is a good start.
I look forward to seeing the progress for next years competition.
"Quick guys, we gotta find a way to spin the Earth up really fast so we can call our elevator geosyncronous. There's $50,000 at stake, people!"
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
"Who here, above the age of 21, thinks that a space elevator has ANY chance of EVER working? LOL!!!"
I find it interesting that you appear to have excluded yourself from voting. I'm not sure if that's very wise or just very stupid.
Not quite geosynchronous...
Oh, it's quite geosynchronous (i.e. above the same point on the Earth surface). It's just not in orbit.
...a group from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada set the height record at 12 meters. New idea - take an elevator to the top of a skyscaper. That'd top 12 meters!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Maybe if we stacked them...
Go back to steam engines, stirling engines? If your power source is light, why bother with electrical engines? Use some liquid gas as fuel in a tank, use the projected light as a heat source, let the gas heat up in a combustion chamber (a piston?) and drive the whole thing up as a locomotive :)
You can't handle the truth.
what is that for y material ..at x length how many meters? I imagine that depends on what reinforces a moveable unit tethered to another?
then altitude: pounds per si
http://www.usask.ca/
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.
There is a quite a list of things that are NASA castoffs that are used in everyday life
Those pressurized pens that write underwater and upside down are cool. That and I don't think you'll hear anyone deny Tang is pretty sweet!
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
I didn't think of that as the really hard part in the space elevator problem. I'm sure somebody will figure out how to build a climber. I would have thought that the hard part is figuring out how to build a cable that the climber could climb, which seems to involve scaling up the best known materials by 10 orders of magnitude.
It reminds me of the old joke about the drunk looking under the lamppost for the quarter he dropped in the alley, because that's where the light is better.
Didn't they do this on Junkyard Wars with a jet ski engine, duct tape, and a couple pieces of PCV?
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Those pressurized pens that write underwater and upside down are cool.
Whilst the Americans were developing this space pen, the Russians just used a pencil.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
It seems the solution to this problem is to add a basement.
That's what I thought. I was wrong.
The argument is reduced to spending for the sake of NASA jobs. Communism.
I suggest you read Slashdot
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
... was disqualified for "inappropriate" elevator music... Under testing situations, all of our patients (read: monkeys, elderly, humans, and fish) were driven insane, then promptly driven sane, then insane, then sane, and so forth during the 62.5 mile elevator ride finished. After the tenth go around we decided the cost to hosing out the compartment filled with bile, blood, and bits of hair were not worth the cash prize. So it goes. Additionally, the PSP battery life wasn't sufficient to stave off elevator-maddness either. http://trs.nis.nasa.gov/archive/00000377/01/tm1085 37.pdf
That is a myth. The space program was responsible for a lot more than Tang and 'space pens'. Then again, there are things that you can't put a price on, such as the need for mankind to go to space.
For whoever modded this as flamebait, in the future I'll make sure to bold all of the facts so you can find them. I can imagine that it must have been hard to find the second half of my post, being immediately following the first half.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
That's amusing. Terrible pity it just isn't true, isn't it?p
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.as
FTA "One of the problems with a power beam is you get so much fall off in light intensity the farther it goes,"
o ff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aof ficial&q=death+ray+site%3Aslashdot.org&btnG=Search
hm... looks like no one thought of using a death ray for this. http://www.google.com/search?hs=tTo&hl=en&lr=&c2c
sarchasm
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.
Short of a superconductor, practical wired power transmission is measured in hundreds or at best thousands of miles. Tens of thousands would be too much to hope for.
it's gotta be turtles-All the way up! Where's my $50K?
no wonder they fired all those engineers/scientist...
offer potatoes as prize, free student labor, no need to spend $$ on materials or labs, leech technology... PROFIT.. yes... excellent..
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...
I'm not clever enough for a sig...
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The top prize is 50K...deduct 50% for university overhead, about 12K for graduate student salary, 5K for professor salary, and you might have 8K for materials budget. What happens when you need a special diode that costs 2K?
It sounds like a great idea, they should sweeten the pot a little more (and I did RTFA, 100K won't be enough either).
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Plz stick your penis into the ass of the nearest mac-user and thank GOD for aids!
I guess they're sighing with relief right now.
You've managed to lambaste NASA for the space shuttle, for returning to Apollo-style launches, -and- for pursuing the space elevator. What's your alternative technology? The warp drive?
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 (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.
crazy dynamite monkey
What I don't understand is why they don't just supply power on the cables that they are climbing. I realize that in a real elevator, the cables would be carbon fiber or something else that isn't conductive material. Is it too much to run a metal wire for power? Does it add that much weight? If so, this is a serious limitation to the whole space elevator idea. It is going to take a lot of energy to take more than a token amount of cargo into orbit... even on an elevator.
Here I thought that the elevator itself was unrealistic. Now we have to figure out how to power it?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You dropped this:
this Karma courtesy of Eddie Izzard, Dress To Kill (1999)
Last I checked, the Sears Tower's Skydeck is right around 400 meters (quarter mile) off the ground. And they run one single elevator from bottom to top.
This has nothing to do with Otis or any other traditional elevator companies. You obviously do not understand the concept very well to compare the "space elevator" to a traditional elevator. The design philosophy is completely different. The only reason people call it a space elevator is that it lifts crew/cargo from one point to another following a path that is, for the lack of a better term, in the general direction of straight up.
Otis does not build elevators with fixed tethers. Throughout history, elevators have always been built as a big box hung on steel cables with a counter-weight on the other end. The cables get pulled by a motor, and transfers that motion to the big box.
If anything, the space elevator is envisioned to be more like a monorail: a fixed track and the box climbing along it.
Comparing the space elevator to the lifts in multi-story buildings is just stupid. Beyond the fact that both involve cables of some sort and are meant to raise and lower things, there's very little similarity. And to think that an Otis employee would have anything useful to contribute because of his/her job is laughable.
OK, who was the joker that kept hitting all the buttons in the elevator? No wonder it was so slow, it kept having to stop at all the floors. :)
\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.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
All we need is a really deep elevator shaft and a big spring at the bottom - in the cartoons, things always bounce higher...
Oh well, what the hell...
They can use lasers,
<DR-EVIL>
And next years models will include some frickin' sharks...
</DR-EVIL>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Of course NASA is obsessed with this 'space elevator', they're probably all out of shape. I'll take the space stairs and be at the top before their fancy elevator is even finished!
Sorry but I read this list as all the right reasons for the prize. A thorny problem with obvious returns. That's what NASA is for.
Current estimates suggest that a space elevator will be deployed in 2045 or so. I lunar elevator could be done much sooner-and would have immediate practical value.
12 meters. That would be easy to launch a satellite into geosyncronous orbit. Just make it's orbital velocity 20,000 miles per hour.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Beyond the fact that both involve cables of some sort and are meant to raise and lower things, there's very little similarity. And to think that an Otis employee would have anything useful to contribute because of his/her job is laughable.
I see! So, beyond serving the same function using very similar methods, space elevators and real elevators have very little similarity. That is what you're saying, isn't it? Well, I suppose that you are right in the sense that real elevators are real, while space elevators don't/won't exist.
I'm curious as to what it's like in your fantasy world where, it is laughable that someone with professional experience in designing, manufacturing and building smaller scaled versions of the device in question would have Nothing "useful to contribute". Who then would have someting useful to contribute? You? Little pink pixies? It seems to me that it is you who is laughable.
Borrowing from the original post and assumptions of your age base on your user ID, what do you think of DS9? The bee's knees, what?
I'm sure I don't know, but the folks at LiftPort Group have a FAQ which they provide their answers to many, if not all, of the points you make.
Granted, they are in the business of selling the Space Elevator concept, but they can do math too.
I am quite annoyed that NASA would even risk $50,000 of mine and other tax payer's money on such a preposterous game.
But this is what government is for. In a republic such as ours, the presumption is that a service or commodity for which any dolt can see the need is going to be supplied by the private market. Why not? You can get rich doing so (cf. Gates, Bill). On the other hand, there are a few things that people as individuals or even large firms can't provide (such as national security) or won't provide because it isn't obvious they're going to work -- such as space elevators.
Enter the government. It's government's job to finance "preposterous flights of fancy," because private industry (very sensibly) won't. Most of that blue-sky stuff turns out to be nonsense, naturally, But some of it doesn't. Some of it, in fact, turns out to be ideas so ingenious that they seemed like pure folly to ordinary folks -- that would be you and me and nearly all other voters -- when they were originally proposed. And, of course, these are the clever ideas that will sustain our ability, a hundred years from now, to compete internationally on the basis of being smarter than anyone else, not working for less. I don't know about you, but I prefer to work in a high-wage, low-volume economy than a low-wage, high-volume economy.
Now, there's no doubt a proper amount of bread that government should cast on the waters. We could argue about that. But not in this case. I don't see how anyone who accepts the role of government in financing very basic research could figure that $50,000 out of a $1.8 trillion Federal Budget is wildly over the top.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/basics/g-dutch-auction. html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
One thing is when you make a competition and throw some money at it, but as soon as you start making the rule that it has to be 50% better than what we got already. Then it's just a cheap way to get some willing students to try off their talent. The more this happens, the less jobs will they have to fill.
I'm not saying i don't approve, cause there must be alot of research coming out of this contest, but don't sell your soles too cheap.
Sorry 'bout that. It's: http://www.liftport.com/faq.php
why oh why did everyone try to build an ascending elevator? They could easily meet the speed requirements with descending types ;)
I guess I'll have stick with the stairway to heaven
This sig is false.
I miss the paw-print sweat pants. Except on the chicks with large bottoms from the College of Education...
Kind of puts a different meaning to the phrase...
Sure, and last year all of the DARPA Grand Challenge entries made it "not quite" to the finish line. But just as there were more successful entries this year, there will be more successful space elevator technology demonstrations in the future.
if or when you become weightless in the elevator.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Mmm, but let us think this all the way through. If there is no more international competition, then there is no more difference between nations. That means we all live under one political system.
/. denizens. And perhaps even very different from what a Wyoming rancher or Bill Gates or Robert Mugabe likes. Which brings up an interesting question: which political system is the one political system under which we're all going to live? Is it going to be my preferred system? Or yours? Or Gates'? Or (shudder) Robert Mugabe's?
However....my absolute preferred top-notch hurray huzzah political system is, I dare say, not quite the same as yours. Or as other
See, the nice thing about having lots of different countries with lots of different political systems, is that you have the chance, at least, of finding one you like and moving there to live under it.
Furthermore, if people can generally move around, it sets up a handy competition between political systems. Systems that oppress their people or which generally fail to help their citizens prosper lose population (note Soviet Russia and Communist China had a healthy emigration rate, and people will risk their lives to escape North Korea). Successful systems gain people, especially clever people who are more likely to be able to emigrate.
So, I dunno, I kind of like the fact that there's lots of political system in the world, just like I like the fact that there are lots of car companies competing for my allegiance. I just wish it was as easy for people to switch national allegiance as it is to switch which brand of car you drive. Then we might see some rapid reform among the nastier systems of government. Nothing like the prospect of being Top Leader of Nobody at All to make a dictator start rethinking his methods.
P.S. Instead of religion and nationalism as the top two leading causes of death in the world, can I nominate (1) bad hygiene and (2) stupidity? Seems to me the Black Death did in a lot more people in the late Middle Ages than the roughly contemporary wars of religion, and even in our own day far more young men died of drinking and driving between 1960 and 1973 than died in Vietnam.
The solution is to loop it, like a vertical clothesline with a pulley in geosynchronous orbit, then the power source can stay on the ground. Two elevators, and a forward/reverse switch. The descent energy is recaptured without any wasteful electrical/mechanical/whatever conversions.
Of course, the downside is needing twice as many carbon nanotubes....
Yes, but the **tether** could counter the force of gravity exerted on the climber the whole way up. IANAP, but I'm pretty sure the velocity is a non-issue here.
E = m * c^(Hammer)
I don't think that a space elevator is out of the question; I just think it is the next "flying car" or "cold fusion". We think it can be done, but the technology and research required to get it going is always 20 years away, or some aspect of it always seems to be infeasible. More power to the people working on it, but I don't think it will ever materialize. Maybe if we had flying cars to transport cold fusion reactors to power each segment of the space elevator...
I can only imagine what potential (non-Canadian) employers will think when they see I have a degree from the University of Saskatchewan.
GE liked my U of S degrees just fine when they hired me. Now, if you had a University of Regina degree, that would be a different story....
why not just attach a smaller rocket to a set of helium balloons? let it fly up to whatever altitude that is max for heliumballoons, and ignite the rocket? cheap fun.
Apart from that no one has grown single walled tubes longer than a few cm. I don't remember if they were metallic or semiconducting (or if they even could tell).
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Anyway I think the system is not very feasible - see the other comments to your post.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
You are taking the analogy between a space elevator and a normal elevator much too literally. A space elevator is not supported by the ground. It's held up by the fact that the Centre of Mass is (roughly) in orbit. The "elevator cars" would not be pulled along by moving cables but would "crawl" along the cable under their own power (how to get the power too them was the subject of this competition).
A $50,000 prize is peanuts for the level of technology they expect to be developed. I guess because it doesn't have military applications (such as DARPA's recent unmanned vehicle contest, which has a $2 million prize) they can only afford a chump-change offer for the development of technology that is probably worth billions, but would most likely cost several million dollars to produce. And they expect that kind of technology on $50,000. I'm surprised they got much of a response at all.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Why do the cars need to travel all the way to the end of the tether? Only the thether's anchor needs to be in a geosynchronous orbit. The cars should be able to stop in or slightly above LEO to dispense with their loads.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
You are correct that most people do not migrate from the place of their birth. But I think the conclusions we can draw from that are limited. The most important reason is that people are fairly likely to have attitudes broadly similar to their parents and their neighbors. Hence the probability that in each and every generation the majority of people must move to be satisfied is low. For example, if I find that Argentina suits me better than the U.S., and I move there, it's not that likely that my children will, willy nilly, prefer to be back in the U.S., while my grandchildren prefer Argentina again, and so forth.
/. seem no less passionate than the debates in the salons of France in 1848, or in the alehouses of New England in 1776.
What we'd need to examine, then, is the pattern of migrations over multiple generations. If we rephrase your question to ask: how likely is it that some ancestor in the past four or five generations of each person has moved from one country to another -- why, then we find large chunks of the world population has moved when it could. The United States, for example, is almost entirely made up of people who moved here or whose ancestors did so less than 3 or 4 generations ago. In the United States -- indeed, almost throughout the First World -- migration now tends to be playing as big a role if not a bigger role in population changes than native births and deaths.
The second reason is that the ability to move is still often restricted, either politically (as in the remaining Communist nations) or economically (as in, say, sub-Saharan Africa). The fact that the demand for personal yachts is small does not tell us how many people would like personal yachts, since they are quite expensive. Similarly, for many nations of the world, we do not as yet know what fraction of their population would move if they could.
Hence I think your conclusion that free migration would be an unimportant perturbation on world population is not likely to be correct. I also think your conclusion that people largely don't migrate because they're happy enough (if not perfectly happy) where they are is not correct. You're probably right as far as the United States goes, but this is a country with massive and continuing immigration. Thousands risk their lives daily to get here. That is, evidence suggests that this is the currently most attractive system under which to live. That means we can hardly draw conclusions about the rest of the world's happiness with their system from the happiness of people under the U.S. system.
Finally, your idea that the ultimate one-world system would just naturally be a good and decent system strikes me as historically unlikely. There have been multiple bloody revolutions, civil wars, et cetera across the globe in the last four centuries, massive strife involving millions, as people struggle over what will be their political and economic system. That is, the historical evidence -- not to mention simple things like the present "Blue State/Red State" divide in the US, or the debates over the EU Constitution in Europe -- strongly suggests there is in fact no broad agreement on the best political and economic system, and that there are huge numbers of adherents of at least several systems that are in such violent contrast to each other that their supporters regard each other as more or less deadly enemies.
Nor, I think, is there even the suggestion that a consensus is slowly evolving. I don't see any evidence that political struggles over the correct form and scope of government, or of the correct economic system are becoming fewer and fewer over the years. The debates on such topics here on