$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

Re:Space elevator?

[MozeeToby]

That's why I like the idea of a Launch Loop better (not that it doesn't have its issues too). It uses kinetic energy to maintain the structure rather than tension so it could in theory be built with modern materials. It also launches in minutes rather than the days, weeks, or even months that some space elevator designs call for. It would have a much higher launch capacity and is built on the ground rather than having to boost a cable into orbit. It doesn't require an anchor weight in high orbit and since the energy for launch is also transfered mechanically you don't have to worry about beaming power anywhere. Finally, it would act as a huge and efficient energy store, meaning we could, in theory, use 100% solar/wind power and use a launch loop as the worlds biggest battery for night time and cloudy days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

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!"

Re:Helicopter Pilot

[Grishnakh]

This is actually a pretty dangerous job for a helicopter pilot. If his engine fails (which does happen from time to time), he'll be unable to autorotate and will crash fatally. Just like fixed-wing airplanes, helicopters require forward motion to be able to recover from engine failures by gliding to the ground. For this reason, helicopter pilots generally try to avoid hovering unless they're just above the ground; takeoffs and landings are done with forward motion as much as possible.

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."