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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..."
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.
Why too fast?
That's why its a challenge. If the parameters are too easy you don't get great innovation.
If I could change anything I would have allowed the competitors to design, build and provide their own energy source instead of using the NASA provided light. That would have allowed another track of innovation.
B O R I N G
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
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.
Problem with that is that you need to raise not only your payload but the fuel. This is why they are trying to utilize solar panels and an external light source.
B O R I N G
Excellent point! In fact, most Space Elevator proponents seem to miss the fact that the energy for the elevator isn't free. You still have to expend at least the minimum amount of energy required to move an object into LEO. The physics of the situation say there are no shortcuts.
What you DO gain is:
a) Slower ascent
b) Only minor (if not inconseqential) losses from air friction
c) Ability to expend the power over a long period of time vs. in a huge controlled explosion
d) A workable descent mode that doesn't require that the hull handle extremes
I'm all for the space elevator idea. However, a lot of people need to understand that this is NOT existing technology. While it's very much possible for the necessary breakthroughs to be completed in the next few decades, dropping everything and working on a Space Elevator would only mean that we'd lose space access for a very long time. That is why NASA is pursuing the CEV and not the Space Elevator as the next major launch vehicle.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.