Carnival of Space #30

Have a look at the new Carnival. Eventually I'll get down to writing something again, I'm just getting used to doing everything on my PS3 now that my laptop is at the shop getting re-pixelated.

New article up at Asahi

I talk about viruses, anti-spyware software, and Robert Heinlein. All in the same paragraph.

Check it out here.

New Carnival of Space up

There's a great picture from Japan's floaty-roboty-thing that's orbiting the Moon right now.

And the Carnival of Space is up.

New Carnival of Space-ificationarying up at the Planetary Blog.

Go read about comets, the new planet orbiting 55 Cancri, and private exploration of Space. It's all there! Except cake!

NASA Centennial Challenges

And only 36,499.907km to go!

I've wanted to write an entry on NASA's Centennial Challenge program for a while now, but haven't had the chance because of silly unimportant things like work and family. Here's the original idea for a piece for Toronto's Globe and Mail. It's written with the average person in mind, so bear with the over-explanation.

Five groups of Canadian university students will be visiting Utah this month to take part in a NASA prize competition worth half a million dollars, and all they have to do is build an elevator that will go into space. Or at least, build a model of one.

Different groups from McGill University, Queen's University, and the Universities of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan are all taking part in NASA's Beam Power Challenge October 19-21 near Salt Lake City, Utah. To win, they have to design, build, and successfully test a robot that will climb a ribbon using power beamed to it from the ground.

The idea of a Space Elevator was popularized in the late 1970's by science fiction writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke, but was first proposed by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky more than a century ago. While expensive to build, the cost of each “launch” of the elevator could be a fraction of a rocket launch, and as technology has improved, the space elevator has won a number of proponents. No one actually knows how to build one yet, but the organizers behind the Beam Power Challenge hope to at least solve the problem of how to get power to the elevator car.

Much bigger than this one. Source

The goal of the competition is for teams to send a beam of power to their climbers using what basically amounts to a big flashlight. Receivers on the climber take the light shining on the elevator from the uber-flashlight, and just like solar panels, convert the light to electricity for use in the climber's motors.

The field is varied; in addition to the teams from Canada, there are teams from Japan and Spain, small tech firms and inventors, and even a high school team from California.

The team whose robot manages to climb a ribbon at more than 2m/s takes the whole pot. Though that doesn't sound very fast, the University of Saskatchewan team (USST) had the fastest climber, but ultimately lost last year's competition because they were too slow by less than an inch and a half per second.

“It has finally sunk in how close we were,” wrote USST's Clayton Ruszkowski in an email. “Last year we missed $150,000 by just 0.04 m/s. So literally every gram and watt count.”

Computer modeling of how calm I would be if I had lost out on that much money.

Since no one has won the challenge yet, the stakes are bigger as last year's purse rolled over to make up this year's $500,000 prize. USST are confident that they can pull off a win this year, but decided that they had to make some changes to their system.

“Our design will be very similar to last year's, but some improvements in materials will be seen. It's going to be a very sleek unit. In the end the small things add up to a lot,” Ruszkowski wrote.

The UBC students, last year's favourites to win, have also changed their tactics in order to learn from both their own mistakes and those of the other teams.

“(We're) coming on very strong this year, with a brand-new design that's really centred around producing a rigorously-tested, high-performance, lightweight, and near-foolproof system,” UBC's Damir Hot wrote.

They are even trying to save some money and lower the complexity of their design by using a less technical approach.

“We're using reflected sunlight as our beam source - using large coaxial mirrors allows us to take a set-and-forget mentality to beam guidance, a concept which is a huge challenge to other teams (using guided lasers).”

NASA's Centennial Challenge program was designed to find cheap answers to expensive problems. The program includes a competition to build a lunar lander and another requiring teams to extract oxygen from simulated Moon dirt (aptly named the MoonROx Challenge). But they don't want big aerospace companies to use their massive resources to sweep away the competition. According to Ken Davidian, the NASA contractor managing the Centennial Challenge program, NASA has a more important goal.

Not this kind of "Moon Rocks"

“One of the major purposes of the Centennial Challenge is to identify new and innovative sources of technologies,” he said in an interview in February. [http://www.thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=668]

Though the field is bigger this year, the Canadian teams haven't escaped his attention.

“Canada has a been very, very strong contender in the beam power competition, [with teams like] the University of Saskatchewan,” he said.

NASA has half a dozen other challenges going – with total prize money of between $300,000 and $2,000,000 US – and more are planned. Only two challenges have been completed so far – the Astronaut Glove Challenge in May and the Personal Air Vehicle Challenge in August – but Davidian isn't fazed by the lack of clear winners.

“One of my dreams is that people come into a competition and NASA see someone they want to hire. There are a lot of criteria [for NASA to declare the program a success]. I hate to say it, but awarding a prize purse is one of the least important.”

Carnival of Space

Check out the Carnival of Space this week. There are a couple of really interesting posts up.