$2 Million NASA Power Beaming Challenge Heating Up

carstene writes "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial Challenge Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight Research Center. The contest uses a scale model of a space elevator as a race track. Entrants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this technology could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge electric UAV's in-flight or even a space elevator in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow on twitter, or or via blog."

Comments

Re:Space elevator?

[FudRucker]

what really sucks is when you're stuck between floors

Helicopter Pilot

[CompressedAir]

NASA: "We'd like you to hover for a few hours dangling a cable."

Pilot: "Boring!"

NASA: "Oh, and several teams will be shooting lasers in your direction."

Pilot: "Now you're talking!"

I'd like to know

[idontgno]

what brave soul wants to pilot the test helicopter anchoring the top of the beanstalk, while engineers of varying degrees of competence are aiming powerful directed energy beams at an object suspended a short distance below them.

"Do not glance outside of cockpit with remaining eye."