Chalk one up for the engineers.
Two teams of Canadian engineering students routed a field of five American teams of privately funded hobbyists, at the first-ever Space Elevator Games, held in California last weekend.
The challenge? Make a device that pulls itself up a thin ribbon to a height of 50 metres, at a speed of at least one metre per second. And oh yeah, the only power you can use is a 10,000-watt searchlight, which remains earthbound.
A team of University of Saskatchewan engineers came closest, with a team from the University of British Columbia (UBC) taking second. But no one went home with the $50,000 first prize. But they did show that it is possible to transmit power over a beam.
This is of great interest to NASA, which has set up a series of Centennial Challenges, through which it aims to tap some less conventional talent to solve some vexing space-related engineering problems. Beamed power is an attractive proposition, because it could make for spacecraft that don’t need to carry a power source around.
And such challenges have produced results in the past. Last month, the Grand Challenge competition, set up by DARPA-the American agency that deals with advanced military research projects-produced a winner. Stanford students went home with a cool US$2 million, after redesigning a Volkswagen Touareg to drive itself, completely unaided, through a 211-kilometre-long course across Nevada desert. It did so in less than seven hours.
In designing climbing devices that harness their power from a light beam, both Canadian teams looked to solar cells for help. The University of Saskatchewan’s climber was covered with a square-metre’s worth of arrays. It only managed to climb to about 12 metres, but was plagued with power problems.
“First of all, we weren’t getting enough power,” explained Edwin Zhang, one of the team leaders. They were allowed to shine another two searchlights onto their device. But even then they had a snag.
“Those searchlights had to be oriented at exactly the right angle” in order to deliver sufficient power to climb, said Zhang.
That is why Zhang’s team couldn’t muster the rate of one metre a second. “We weren’t going up continuously, we were going up in steps.
“In between steps, there was a lot of frenzied adjusting going on, with the searchlight, to get the right angle,” he said.
Snowstar, the UBC team, used a similar design. But they only managed to climb to seven metres. While team leader Steve Jones admitted their climber was not as clean and professional as that of their Saskatchewan counterparts, he did have some impressive results to tout.
They were the only team to successfully climb on the first day of the competition; they were also the only team that didn’t make use of the additional searchlight. “And we were given an award ‘Most likely to succeed in 2006’,” Jones added.
Both teams worked on shoestring budgets: UBC’s team spent $5,000, and the Saskatchewan team around $15,000. “Their initial reaction is a confused, dazed look,” said Zhang. But eventually, they come around.
The sci-fi vision behind the competition is that of the space elevator: a long strong tether leading from the surface of the earth into outer space. Currently, neither the materials to build such a tether, nor the beam-powered climber to traverse it exist.
But while NASA has little enthusiasm for a space elevator, it remains interested in sending power over a beam. That’s why the competition is happening again next year; the prize purse stands at $150,000.
Competition will be stiffer, though, as both MIT and West Point Academy have thrown their hats into the ring. But the UBC and Saskatchewan engineers are already sharpening their knives.
