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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.
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.