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Space Elevator Challenge
MattSparkes writes "For the second year in a row, no team has won the $200,000 prize in the Space Elevator Challenge at the Wirefly X Prize Cup. Three teams were disqualified before the contest even started. Another competition at the event has been held up by confusion. Incredibly, it seems the organisers of the competition are not sure whether the ribbon used was 50 or 60 metres long, and whether any team completed the climb fast enough to win."
GNAA Issues Apology In The Death Of Rob Levin's Bike
trogg (GNAP) Trolladelphia, PA - The GNAA's own blackman issued an apology statement to Huffy concerning the bicycle that didn't survive the vehicular homicide of Rob "lilo" Levin.
"It's unfortunate that an innocent bicycle had to be destroyed in order to achieve our goal of neutralizing the ever growing zionist force that is "freenode", stated GNAA President Timecop, "but we stand behind blackman and his actions, he was successfully able to remove the highest ranking officer of said juden organization.
"The death of the bicycle has had a tremendous effect on blackman." says Jmax. "Even after 12 hours of straight anal fisting and countless gerbils being inserted into his anus, he is still unable to achieve a full erection, it is quite sad." Blackman has been residing in Clearwater, Florida at the Church of Scientology headquarters since the tragic accident. "I believe that our Scientologist friends will be able to help me cope with what has happened. I want to be LOL HEARTIES again!! " (taken from a phone interview with blackman himself)
The president of Chile has declared September 17th, the day Rob Levin was pronounced dead, to be a national holiday for the country with celebrations of prolapsed rectums and gay nigger sperm parades.
About Huffy:
The Huffy Corporation OTCBB: HUFCQ is an American manufacturer of bicycles and golf equipment. It was founded in 1887 when George P. Huffman purchased the Davis Sewing Machine Company and moved its factory to Dayton, Ohio. Seven years later, in 1894, Huffman adapted the factory to manufacture their well-known line of bicycles.
About Freenode:
Still leaderless
About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY?
Are you a NIGGER?
Are you a GAY NIGGER?
Well it seems that this will be won next year :)
More and more I see that this sort of prize is excellent way to foster development of new technologies. This should be applied to other technical challenges we face...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Don't all depictions of space elevators, like that in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars involve enormous amount of strong carbon, like carbon nanotubes or diamond? Where would small teams be able to acquire such amounts of a material that's not even mass-produced yet?
Like the Apollo program, maybe this is one area where strong government funding is vital.
I know if I had organized an event like this with a prize like that at stake, I would at least try to know what it would take for a team to win.
I think that the material to make the ribbon can't actually be produced yet, and a 50-60 metre long section is about all that can be used. However, for the purposes of a test like this, it will suffice. The competition is more to do with getting the elevator technology advancing than actually putting together a working device.
Matthew Sparkes
is already responsible for a major advancement: the first private space ship able to relaunch in two weeks (SpaceShipOne).
The prize is definately motivation, and the X-Prize foundation has a few contests going:
-The Ansari X-Prize (Get 3 people to 100km twice in two weeks) - WON
-The Archon X-Prize (Sequence 100 people in 10 days with $10,000 cost per person) - OPEN
-The Automotive X-Prize (Currently being developed. Create super-efficent cars or alternative energy) - FUTURE
Those are the three the X-Prize Foundation has created. An interesting fact from the X-Prize website: "Ten times the amount of the prize purse was spent by the competitors trying to win the prize."
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
I preferred the 'Canadians Vie for Space Elevator Victory' title this piece was given further down the page.
How does a space elevator work?
Since the earth isn't flat, it can't reach all the way down to earth... And it certainly can't drag along the ground. So what's the practical use? How do people even get into the tube to begin with?
Blog -
Infosec: "We don't really know what you're doing, but we're certain it's bad. Disqualified!"
Development: "We're not sure how long the cable is supposed to be, so we'll hardcode it in the top of the code. If we're wrong, its out of scope and we won't fix it."
Engineering: "We don't know how fast it is supposed to climb, so we'll pick a value. If we're wrong, it was Marketing's failure to gather the right requirements.""
Audit: "All your project are belong to us".
Milton: "I could just burn down the building..."
Geez, who is running this thing, the PHB?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If I'm going up in to space on a giant elevator, I want it to be nailed on to something a bit more substantial sounding that a 'ribbon'. Heck, all the ones I used to read about in 1950's sci-fi books were basically normal elevators, steel girders, nice big box with windows, sliding doors etc., just a hundred thousand feet high. THAT's what I'd feel safe in.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
baought the farm...
Sir, I ask you to repost this article as much as possible. Without supporters of you of the Gay Negro Race (GNR), we would not have a place in society. You have no idea what your type means to the GNR. May we meet some day in the afterlife.
And not ONE picture or movie about it? How come?
According to the rules, the circumference of the loop must measure at least 2 metres. ...the Snowstar team from Canada's University of British Columbia, for example, was shy of this by less than half a millimetre.
The diameter of their spool was 0.25% smaller than required, which was probably the result of warping from moving the spool around so it could be weighed, etc, before the competition. So they were disqualified and didn't get to formally compete.
The height of the robot climb is what got me. It's a timed event, and the height they had to climb might have been 10 meters further than the benchmark. Now that's a complete joke.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
You know how people sometimes use the metric of "If you stacked all the X in the world (graham crackers, AOL CD's, empty pantyhose containers) end to end, it would reach the moon and back!" My tentative plan is to find those items and to dedicate them to that exact purpose. Mole of Twinkies stacked end to end, here I come!
Can anyone enlighten me how that thing supposed to work?
We fasten one end on ground and second end is fastened... where???
And what about Earth rotation?
[sarcasm] Which TV show the people pursuing that idea watched too much? [/sarcasm] I cannot recall a show which had advertised that idea. I still think that normal elevator - a-la tower - is much saner idea and can be achieved easier, since it doesn't depend on another end. I think it is more feasible idea compared to super strong tether. Though I was already flamed twice on /. for such opinions. Apparently the TV show was too good.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I don't know if anyone noticed that, but the Pixel vehicle seems somewhat unstable with its single engine.
x elQualification.wmv, later in the hover, when it starts to oscilate the engine thrust vector in order to stabilize the craft. The oscilation seems to be increasing, but it's hard to tell since the hover itself is too short.
You can see it here http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2006_09_23/Pi
I know they _are_ rocket scientists and, no doubt, know about this. But it seems to be a major obstacle to achieve the 180-second hover goal.
I wonder what can be done to improve it without compromising the single-engine simplicity.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
For those who don't have a good understanding of Space Elevators other than some Sci-Fi you may have read that was written 50 years ago: A space elevator consists of 5 primary components: 1. Base Station 2. Ribbon 3. Climber 4. Counterweight 5. Power system This contest is an attempt to trigger innovation in the area of power and climber, not in the ribbon, station or counter-weight. The ribbon would need to be a carbon nanotube-based composite that is a matter of microns thick and very wide. The width of the ribbon would change based on whether it is in Earth's atmosphere (very thin - less affected by wind and less of a danger) or outer space (very thick, to be able to recover from damage from debris). The ribbon would stretch from a base station to approximately 125,000 km to geosynchronous earth orbit, at which point there will be a counterweight - initially the spacecraft used to deploy the ribbon and eventually an orbital station. The climber drives up the ribbon with an electric engine, and will need to be powered wirelessly. Currently the predominate thinking is to use a laser to hit solar-panels on the climber that are tuned for the particular wavelength of light that the laser is emitting. Initial Space Elevators, built in about 10 years for about $10 B, will be able to carry 20 tons of material at a cost of ~$300/kg (contrast that with the next-gen shuttle - $100 Billion, with a capacity of 40 tons @ ~$10,000/kg), with subsequent elevators able to carry up to 200 tons at a cost of $100/kg.
The problem is the music. We can all stand elevator music for a few seconds, maybe a minute or two. But could you imagine dealing with it for hours? We'd all go stark raving mad!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Just curious why it is taking so long to measure the the ribbon to see if it was 60 meters or 50? Is there a specific process to it?
Can I bum a sig?
I want a Wanka-vator!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Why this fixation on electric motors for the climber? The travel takes way too long this way. Use rocket engines, I say. Fast, solid, space-proven technology. Plus, you might be able to avoid the tether construction entirely!
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Why not make the first challenge a 100 metre elevator. Which is still pretty tall.
There would have to be some weight restrictions. Build a tower that tall and see who can
climb up.
...send the next payload up "out of phase" with the oscillation caused by the first one? (its good that space elevators can swing back'n'forth btw... thats how the one on Mars is gonna avoid getting hit by Phobos).
With all the talk about space elevators lately, it's gotten me thinking why we wouldn't also consider the problem from the opposite angle: start at the moon and go down to earth. We could attach a rope/ribbon/ladder/whatever at the moon, then dangle it down into the earth's atmosphere. Naturally we couldn't attach it to the earth due to the asynchronous movement of the two bodies. So instead, we would dangle the ribbon in the air and use an airplane to fly up to it's end.
Some advantages I see in this approach would be that:
Has any research been done into something like this? Is it viable (at least as viable as a space elevator, anyway)?
The height of the moon from earth varies greatly, so then you'd have to make it variable length, and it moves at a pretty nice clip over the earth, creating problems with trying to attach anything to it.
On the very remote chance that you aren't a troll, the moon is about 10 times further away than geostationary orbit.
This isn't even the biggest problem with your proposal.
Keep It Simple Stupid
;)
Just build a space ladder.. and then you could lose some weight on the way up to space.
This wikipedia article has some interesting references on a lunar space elevator. I think there ought to be an X prize for that specific accomplishment. This is the sort of think that might be relatively economical in a few years. Just getting a stable prize in place could easily accelerate the time this would get accomplished by several years. What a lunar space elevator means is that suddenly, it becomes a lot more economical to get various forms of mass to orbit. It would still be expensive to get people up there,but a lunar space elevator would be a major infrastructure item helping to make large structures in orbit.
Today's fun fact: a mole of Twinkies stacked end to end, assuming they're about three inches long (I haven't one around to measure), would stretch from here to Andromeda and about 90% of the way back.
So you can't play if you're off by a millimetre, but if they're off by 10m or so, that's ok. :-P
You also have to handle the oscilation modes of the cable as a plucked string.
Seems to me you can turn this to your advantage:
Initially the climber plus payload pulls the counterweight back - but then it swings forward, converting a backward momentum delta to a forward one, which you can then use to accellerate the payload further with more climbing. When you get to a decent release point you can also wait until you've got extra forward momentum to help circularize your orbit or improve your launch, and let go then.
You end up with the whole thing in some combination of string vibration and pendulum oscilation. But you can damp much of that out on the climber's way back down - unless you want to deliberately leave some of that energy and momentum in the elevator's motion for use by the next payload.
The point is that by modulating the climber's travel rates you can move energy and momentum among the vibration modes, payload motion, and Earth's rotation, ending up up dumping it into the payload, where it's useful, rather than accumulating it in the cable and counterweight until you pull the counterweight out of orbit.
Devil's in the details, of course. You'll need a bunch of computation and to tweak it with feedback measurements from payload to payload. (If nothing else, wind loading will pump up the vibrational modes.)
You might also put "dampers" on the cable. In particular, by letting part of a climber's mass move sideways with the cable and part lag behind you can collect vibrational energy at the climber, damping it out of the cable's motion, and using it to generate power for more climbing. (Or avoid the extra gear on the climber by doing it at the ground station - letting the attachment move along a track with a generator/motor/actuator attached, to damp out the reflection by recovering the power.)
It might be interesting to analyze how much energy you could send up the cable to the climber by shaking it. (Probably not enough. But worth a look - especially if the cable is not prone to fatigue.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In terms of energy required, it takes the same amount of energy to climb at 1 m/s as it does at 1km /s. The difference is in air resistance that is very high at high speed (function of v ^2).
The only benefit of the thether system is that it allows slow speed climbing. For some reason, we don't value trains that go 1 m/s, and if they can't have climbing bots go up and down on the same thether, which would indeed seem like a big complication, and there's no room in space to store a bunch of robots so you can send them all back down at the same time, then you can only bring a small payload up to space every 10 days. The reason trains don't go 1 m/s even if it saves fuel is that efficient track utilization is important too.
It might take decades in order to get sufficient payload totals up there to justify (as in break even on) the energy savings of building the thethers, and its not clear that these cables will last decades.
I was one of the team leaders for one of the elevator games teams. The article linked here gives some sense of the incompetence of the competition organizers, but the truth of the matter was far worse. The climber challenge was fraught with late/nonexistent equipment, no parity in the rules between the teams, vague rules and inaccuracies along every step of the way. The tether strength challenge was a joke, with professional organizers funded by NASA failing to properly carry out a test that any science/engineering student could do in first year.
To give an analogy, dozens of teams put thousands of dollars and hours into building race cars, only to show up at the venue and find that instead of a formula one circuit there was a dirt track through a cornfield. Our team spent thousands of hours on our entry and so did all of the other participants. It's too bad the organizers couldn't have repaid this dedication and passion with a small amount of their own effort.
It's an elevator, for cripe's sake. We've had them since the 3rd century BC. They've been reasonably safe for over 100 years now.
No new technology is needed for the car itself.
There are two problems to solve: Suspending enough cable outside the gravity well so that it won't fall back to earth, and keeping it 'straight' as it's whirled round 'n round.
Neither of those two things can be tested by a model. At least, not here on Earth, as our own gravity would skew the results.
The car itself, along with the drive mechanism are both proven technology, used in every high-rise across the planet.
So, string the big cable (made of BuckyBalls, perhaps?), mount solar panels up top to take care of the electrical requirements, and off we go.
The really exciting thing here would be if it could actually be built soon enough for Arthur C. Clarke to actually ride in it, similar to the way he was able to use his home satellite dish in Sri Lanka to fax chapters of 2010 to his New York publisher...
It is not in unrestrained orbit. Pitiful really.
I'd have thought megatech or gigatech would be more appropriate for a thing umpteen thousand miles long