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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.
They should set a slightly lower speed limit. This would encourage more people to work on the problem.
The minimum speed was 1 meter/s = 3.6km/h = 2.2369 miles/h. I can walk faster than that.
Geosynch is 35,786 km above sealeve according to wiki. At 3.6 km/h it would take over a year to get up to geosynch. They really should increase the minimum speed.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Not quite geosynchronous...
Oh, it's quite geosynchronous (i.e. above the same point on the Earth surface). It's just not in orbit.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Maybe if we stacked them...
The problem was apparently that the spotlight they were using had too diffuse of a beam. Next year, when the teams provide their own beaming systems, it might turn out better.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
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.
Wonderful idea! Now all we have to do is build a skyscraper that's 22,240 miles tall, and we can use these babies to get into orbit.
Power source this time was limited to a single high-power searchlight... faster requires a whole lot more power, and it simply wasn't going to be available in time.
Most teams didn't have the chance to test at their own facility with their own searchlight, nor at the competition site. If you can't really test, you shouldn't assume highly efficient operations...
The tether in use wasn't that tall, and accellerating and decellerating a whole lot within the available vertical distance was a nonstarter.
This was a introduction to parts of the problem set, not a realistic attempt to engineer production grade tether climbers. Everyone involved knows that...
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
You've missed a major point to the space elevator scenario--controlled descent.
In a standard descent, all the excess kinetic energy is wasted as heat. In a space-elevator scenario, you can use the energy of the descending cars to assist in powering the ascending cars. Net overall energy expenditure required is just enough to start the system and overcome the inevitable inefficiencies. Your average energy-per-car can be much lower than the rocket scenario.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.