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Prize for space elevator model

— Photo: AP

The LaserMotive robotic climber being prepared for the Space Elevator Games at the Edwards Air Force Base, California, on Wednesday.

LOS ANGELES: A Seattle team has collected a $900,000 prize in a NASA-backed competition to develop the concept of an elevator to space — an idea spurred by science fiction novels.

The team’s robotic machine raced up more than 900 metres of cable dangling from a helicopter.

Powered by a ground-based laser pointed up at the robot’s photo voltaic cells that converted the light into electricity, the LaserMotive machine completed one of its climbs in about 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

The contest is intended to encourage development of a theory that originated in the 1960s and was popularised by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise.

Space elevators are envisioned as a way to reach space without the risk and expense of rockets.

Instead, electrically powered vehicles would run up and down a cable anchored to a ground structure and extending thousands of kilometres up to a mass in geosynchronous orbit — the kind of orbit communications satellites are placed in to stay over a fixed spot on the Earth.

LaserMotive LLC was presented the check by Andy Petro, progamme manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges, in a ceremony at Dryden Flight Research Facility on Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. The three-day contest required competitors’ vehicles to get to the top, with rewards possible for completing climbs at two levels of speed. LaserMotive could have claimed $2 million if its robot had climbed faster.

Thomas Nugent, one of the principals of LaserMotive, said the company believed the contest would demonstrate the concept of “power beaming” — transmitting energy by laser over long distances. The fourth Space Elevator Games addressed a baby step in the engineering challenging of the concept, not the larger debates of whether physics, materials technology and economics would ever allow one to be built. — AP

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