{"id":4223,"date":"2009-11-05T08:45:09","date_gmt":"2009-11-05T08:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/11\/05\/beyond-rocket-science\/"},"modified":"2009-11-05T08:45:09","modified_gmt":"2009-11-05T08:45:09","slug":"beyond-rocket-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/11\/05\/beyond-rocket-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Rocket Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not getting as much press as the “X Prize” for private rocket launches, but NASA has quietly been running a contest for work toward a “space elevator,” offering up to $2 million for a scheme to transmit power to a small robot climbing a 1km cable. Yesterday, the team from LaserMotive<\/a>, including certified rocket scientist and friend of the blog Jordin Kare, successfully powered a robot up a 900m cable<\/a> using diode laser arrays to send power to solar panels on the robot. They managed an average speed of 3.73 m\/s, which doesn’t get them the full $2 million prize, but qualified them for the $900,000 prize for an average speed above 2 m\/s.<\/p>\n

There are still two other teams in the competition, which will continue today. The Kansas City Space Pirates team got within 50 m of the top, but not fast enough to be in the money, and a team from the University of Saskatchewan has yet to compete at all. LaserMotive can apparently take another crack as well, and over on Twitter, Mary Kay Kare<\/a> says that Jordin has some ideas of how to speed their climber up, and go for the grand prize.<\/p>\n

This is a long, long way from an actual space elevator, of course– working out the power beaming is arguably less of a challenge than finding a material to build the thing out of, which nobody has come close to doing. Still, it’s cool to see, and a reminder that while rockets are flashier, there’s work going on on other ways to get stuff into space in an economical manner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not getting as much press as the “X Prize” for private rocket launches, but NASA has quietly been running a contest for work toward a “space elevator,” offering up to $2 million for a scheme to transmit power to a small robot climbing a 1km cable. Yesterday, the team from LaserMotive, including certified rocket… Continue reading Beyond Rocket Science<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,7,11,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","category-space","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}