FYI,

"Power-Beamers Rise Again"
MSNBC
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/11/03/2117873.aspx

: Just as one big-money contest for high-tech innovators winds down,
: another revs up: The $2 million Power Beaming Challenge, a
: competition that could lay the groundwork for future space
: elevators, is getting under way - and you can follow the action
: live.

: Like the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, the Power Beaming
: Challenge is part of the NASA-backed Centennial Challenges, a
: program aimed at encouraging new technologies that could be adopted
: by the space agency for future exploration.

: Teams entered in the challenge have been working on robotic
: transport systems that can be remotely powered by laser beams to
: climb up a long steel cable. The contest, part of the Space
: Elevator Games managed by the Spaceward Foundation, started up in
: 2005 and has been getting progressively harder every year.

: This year, the teams will have to get their laser-powered robots to
: zoom up to a height of 1 kilometer (0.6-mile-long) on a cable
: that's attached to a helicopter hovering above NASA's Dryden
: Research Center in California's Mojave Desert.

: To win the big money, it's not enough just to get up to the top: To
: qualify for a $900,000 prize, your robot would have to maintain an
: average speed of at least 2 meters (6.6 feet) per second. That's
: about as fast as Batman would rise on his super-strong batrope in
: the movies, the Spaceward Foundation's Ben Shelef told me back in
: August. To qualify for an additional $1.1 million, the robot would
: have to go even faster: 5 meters (16.4 feet) per second.

: Can anybody really perform such a feat? Shelef told me today that
: all three of the teams entered in the competition - the Kansas City
: Space Pirates, LaserMotive and the University of Saskatchewan's
: USST team - were technically capable of taking the prize. But the
: challenge could be complicated by other factors, ranging from
: dealing with the wind to keeping the copter in a stable postion, to
: making sure the cable "racetrack" is easily navigable.

: Shelef is hoping that at least one of the teams will end up with
: some money by the time all is said and done. In order for the full
: $2 million to remain in NASA's kitty, "all three teams would have
: to strike out," Shelef said.

: The formula for determining how much money goes to whom under which
: circumstances is rather complicated - and rather than troubling you
: with the math, I'll just point you to the competition handbook.

: Today the organizers are setting up the vertical racetrack and
: planning some dry runs, just to make sure the system will work.
: Shelef told me that "the first money run" will be on Wednesday.

: The Spaceward Foundation came up with the power-beaming contest
: - plus another competition to encourage the development of super-
: strong tether materials - in order to encourage technologies that
: would be needed to build a space elevator to Earth orbit. If such a
: system could be created, it would revolutionize access to outer
: space. But NASA says power-beaming technology would be of use even
: if space elevators are never built.

: If the technology is perfected, it could be used to keep remote-
: controlled rovers moving on the moon or Mars, even in situations
: where sunlight isn't available. Power-beaming also happens to be a
: key technology for transmitting solar power from space. In the
: shorter term, better laser control systems could have military
: applications as well.

Mark Reiff