Next Stop for the Space Elevator: The $2 Million Prize for the 2010 Competition

LaserMotive, a Seattle-based company that designed the winning entrant in the November 2009, Space Elevator Games, plans to win the 2010 competition with a device that will move faster than 5 meters per second. Led by Tom Nugent and Dr. Jordin Kare, LaserMotive won the 2009 competition at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. The competition was sponsored by The Spaceward Foundation and organized by NASA. Other teams from Kansas and Canada were not as successful in the competition as LaserMotive, which set records for fastest climbing speed (3.97 meters/second), greatest distance for laser power beaming (1 kilometer), and most power transferred to a receiver (over 1 kilowatt).

A space elevator would provide a more feasible, practical way of sending objects from ground to space orbit. Soaring to a height of one kilometer, the flight of LaserMotive's device was the first successful operation of a space elevator. It is much like the Wright Brothers' flight in the sense that it is the first flight of its kind.

LaserMotive's space elevator received beamed energy from a ground-based source. Since the device does not use oil, it better preserves that natural resource than rockets. It is also safer in the sense that passengers on a space elevator would not be sitting on tons of explosive rocket fuel like the astronauts.

The space elevator concept has developed over decades. In 1966, Science magazine published a paper by Isaacs, Vine, Bradner and Bachus that introduced the related idea of a "sky hook". In a 1975 paper published in Acta Astronautica entitled "The Orbital Tower: A Spacecraft Launcher Using the Earth's Rotational Energy", Jerome Pearson explained a related concept. Pearson's idea was the basis for the space elevator in Arthur C. Clarke's 1978 novel "The Foundations of Paradise", which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Science Fiction Novel.

The pace of change in this field is dramatic, as evidenced by a quote from the LaserMotive blog: "Our power beaming world record that I posted about yesterday has already been broken. Luckily, we were the ones who broke it." 2010 may bring even more world records to LaserMotive, and the American public will benefit from the scientific progress.

Source: http://www.lasermotive.com/blog/