One of my favorite Sci-Fi authors is Jerry Pournelle.  I like the stuff he writes on his own but when he and Larry Niven collaborate, they create some of the best Sci-Fi ever written (IMHO, of course).  Chief examples are Footfall, Oath of Fealty, Inferno and, of course, The Mote in God’s Eye.

Dr. Pournelle also maintains his own website, Chaos Manor, and a few days ago, a writer wrote to him about using Prize Money to advance technology.  This is what the writer had to say, along with Dr. Pournelle’s response;

Competition and prizes win big,

Jerry,

I know you are a big fan of prizes to advance technologies. Dig this:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htarm/20090818.aspx

“For several decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has been trying to build a robotic vehicle. But in early 2004, the Department of Defense decided to try something different, and give enterprising civilian organizations a chance to show what they could do. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) held the DARPA Grand Challenge. Put simply, the first robotic vehicle (moving completely under software control, with no human intervention) that could complete a 240 kilometer course, would get a million dollars for its designers. No one even came close. But a second Challenge, held in late 2005, yielded several finishers, and the first one picked up the million dollar prize for navigating a 212 kilometers cross country course in just under seven hours. All vehicles operated under software control, as true robots. The third “Challenge” race was held in late 2007, and had a two million dollar prize for the first vehicle to complete a 60 kilometer course through an urban environment (an abandoned air force base) in under six hours.”

After several iterations of this competition:

“Earlier this month, two T2 vehicles equipped with sensors and control equipment, successfully passed realistic tests. One of the test subjects, controlled from a Stryker wheeled armored vehicle, successfully approached a village (equipped with mannequins set up as pedestrians along the streets), did a perimeter sweep at speeds of up to fifty kilometers an hour, then patrolled the streets, avoiding the pedestrians, and finally departed the area.”

“The DARPA Challenge races have been a bonanza in terms of advancing the state of the art for robotic vehicles. For less than $10 million in prize money and expenses, the Department of Defense has created new technology that would have otherwise cost more than $100 million, and taken a lot longer to perfect.”

It would never work in space, of course. We have to use the NASA monopoly. Of course..

Ed

(Dr. Pournelle’s response); I have never understood why prizes are not popular. They cost almost nothing — perhaps a million a year total to fund a commission that determines if a prize should be awarded — and you know the total to be paid. A ten billion prize for a Lunar Colony Prize (keep 31 Americans alive and well on the Moon for 3 years and one day) would either get us a Moon Base or it would cost nothing. A reusable space ship prize of 5 billion (send the same ship to orbit 13 times in one year) would again get us a space ship or would cost nothing. We spent more than half that on the X-33 fiasco.

I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment, although I think the writer is unfamiliar with the NASA-run Centennial Challenge program.  Look at what has been accomplished so far with the Centennial Challenges, specifically the Space Elevator Games.  From a standing start in 2005, we now have multiple systems capable of directing and tracking 8kw lasers so that they can beam power to a remote climber which will ascend/descend a kilometer long cable.  The representative from the Laser Clearing House who came to inspect and OK the competitor’s equipment commented that the teams had systems which were better than some she had seen in our own military.

So far, these competitions have cost NASA very little (just the costs of administering the competitions).  Even when NASA does have to pay its $2 million prize in the Climber / Power-Beaming competition, they’ll still have received a tremendous bargain.  If they want this technology, they can purchase it (they have 3 options), rather than have to develop it on its own…

(Thanks to the tip for this story from Space For Commerce)

I have a number of feeds in my RSS reader.  Periodically I go through and clear out a bunch that are no longer of interest to me.  One that I’ve never cleared out and always enjoyed reading is Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log.  Alan always finds the most interesting bit of information to pass along.  If you don’t subscribe to his blog, you’re missing a treat…

Alan has also been an avid follower of the efforts to develop a Space Elevator and has been to most of the competitions and most of the US conferences, including this year’s US Space Elevator Conference.

Here is his take on this year’s conference and the Space Elevator in general.  The picture with the tether that the Japanese team brought to this year’s Strong Tether competition shows that tether draped over yours truly’s fat fingers…

Alan refers to Ben Shelef’s Space Elevator Feasibility Condition paper and I’m glad he does.  As I’ve opined here before, I think this is the most significant paper that has come out of the space elevator community in quite some time.  It’s most important point states that unless some sort of unforeseen breakthrough can happen in the development of carbon nanotubes, we’re going to have to live with a tether that is no stronger than ~50 MYuris.  A tether / Space Elevator is still possible with this strength, but it gives us less leeway than we thought we had in the past.

I hope Ben is wrong about this (so does he), but if a ~50 MYuri tether is all we’re going to get, then we should start designing towards that.  This will be the subject of a future post.

It’s ‘fire season’ in California / western US and that has bad consequences besides the obvious.  For the Climber / Power-Beaming competition of the Space Elevator Games, we need a helicopter to hold up the racetrack.  All of the helicopters are now being used to fight these fires so none are available for our testing.

Damn.

So, we’re weather-dependent again…  If it gets really rainy where the fires are burning, then, hopefully, the helicopter we want will free up.  Until then, we’re all waiting as fast as we can…

A couple of the teams have posted updates.

Brian Turner, captain of the Kansas City Space Pirates, sent me this email a few days ago:

This Fortune Small Business Magazine has a nice article about the competition. I have not been able to figure out if it is in the print edition just yet.  It is online at http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/13/smallbusiness/space_elevator.smb/index.htm?postversion=2009081407

As for the competition date. The testing with the new helicopter looks to get slated for the end of fire season. Apparently most helicopters of the size we need are reserved for that work this time of year.  So we are looking at an end of Sept. date at the soonest.

I have been using the extra time for getting caught up on work and family time. Doing things I used to take for granted like mowing my own lawn and changing light bulbs. We have also been working a bit on improving the reliability of the climber system.

Brian Turner
Captain
KC Space Pirates

And, on the LaserMotive Blog, Tom Nugent has updated us with this;

As you probably know by now, the Power Beaming competition was delayed again due to problems with helicopter operations. It seems that the earliest the competition can now happen is late September or October. We’re staying in close contact with Spaceward to keep up with developments, and taking advantage of the extra time to tweak our system. We’re also taking it easy – everybody had been working long, hard hours leading up to the competition, and now we need to rest and reacquaint ourselves with our families while we have some time to breathe…

There’s more – check out Tom’s blog post for the full story…

Finally, USST did post their summary of how the testing went at Dryden, too.  They’ve got some good pictures and it is well worth checking out.

(Picture of California fire status (the ‘Lockheed fire’) from here – click on it for a larger version)

Well, the 2009 Tether Competition, one of the two Space Elevator Games, is over and it was a) very educational and b) a lot of fun.

Only 1 team competed, an entrant from Shizuoka, Japan.  They brought a carbon nanotube tether with them to a) compete against the ‘House Tether’ (the first hurdle) and, if they succeeded, to then try and beat the 5 M-Yuri mark which would make them eligible to win the NASA-donated prizes.

Alas, they did not succeed in beating the House Tether, so they did not qualify to try for the prize money.  But they did a very important thing; they showed up and they showed up with a carbon nanotube tether.

I don’t have the exact numbers of when/where their tether broke.  Ben Shelef (CEO of the Spaceward Foundation – the group that organizers the Space Elevator Games)  had developed a table of this for a 2 meter, 2 gram tether.   The Japanese brought a tether which was both longer and lighter than required.  This put them at a serious disadvantage.  When Ben calculates the exact ‘strength numbers’, I’m sure he’ll put them on the official website of the Space Elevator Games, www.spaceelevatorgames.org.

The tether the Japanese brought was very different from other tethers we’ve seen, it looked like VCR tape – other tethers (especially competition tethers) look like thin ropes.

The nanotubes in their tether were not spun together, they were held together strictly and solely by Van Der Waals force.  The reason they did this was their belief that spinning the nanotube strands ultimately weakens them.  I’m not qualified to speak to that, but time will tell if their approach is superior or not.  They are going to try and use covalent bonding forces (it’s been a long time since High School chemistry) to strengthen their nanotube product.

I’ve included some more pictures in this post – pictures are always interesting 🙂

The topmost picture is a side view of the Japanese tether – as you can see, it looks like a tape from an old VCR Cassette.

The second picture is of this tether after it has been mounted on the “Torture Tether Rack”.

The third picture shows the Rack with the Japanese tether and the “House tether” mounted, side by side.  On the left is the House tether and on right is the Japanese tether.  As you can see, the Japanese tether is quite a bit longer.

The fourth picture shows the Japanese tether after it broke -you can see the end of it laying against the bottom of the Rack.

The last picture is of the Japanese team (Yoku Inoue is in the middle) being congratulated by Andy Petro (on the right), the head of the NASA IPP (Innovative Partner Program).  Andy thanked the team for coming and gave them both NASA Pins to commemorate the event.

I’m sure the Japanese will be back next year, and this time with a year’s experience under their figurative belt – they will be much, much, better…

(Click on any of the picture thumbnails to see a larger version of the picture)

In less than an hour, we should see the Strong Tether competition.  As I wrote yesterday, only one team has showed up, a Japanese team from Shizuoka University.  They’re giving a presentation as I write this post.

I’ve got some pre-competition pictures which I wanted to share with you.  The first one is of Yoku Inoue (on the left) of Shizuoka University and Ben Shelef, CEO of the Spaceward Foundation, host of the Space Elevator Games.  In between them is the scale which will be used to weigh the tethers (note the Microsoft cup in the scale as an homage to our sponsors (thank you again Microsoft!).  Behind Yoku and Ben is the “Tether Torture Rack”.

The second picture is of Andy Petro, the head of NASA’s Centennial Program (these are the people putting up the 2 million US Dollar prize money) and Ben examining the “House Tether” – this is what the carbon nanotube tether brought by the Japanese team must compete against.

The third and final picture is of the raw materials that the “House Tether” is made of.  On the left is a spool of Zylon thread while on the right is a can of 3M Super 77 adhesive.  To make this tether, Ben just wraps several strands of the Zylon around a couple of posts.  Once the tether is of the proper weight (3 grams), Ben sprays the looped strands with the adhesive. The adhesive is used to help keep the tether unraveling, but the main source of strength (outside of the strength of the material of course), is the friction holding the strands together.  The adhesive insures that the friction will happen.  When the tether begins to fail, you can hear the ‘ping’ as the individual strands making up the tether begin to separate.  Once enough of them have separated, the tether then suffers a catastrophic failure; i.e. it snaps.

I won’t be able to blog during the competition (coming up in the next half hour) – it’s just too difficult.  However, I will be Tweeting…

Log on to www.twitter.com/segames to stay up-to-date.  After the competition is offer, I will put up a blog post giving details of the results and some more photos.

(As always, click on the picture thumbnails to see a larger version of the picture)

Yes, the RC car in this video really is being powered by the TRUMPF laser, the same one which will power both the Space Pirates and USST Climbers in the upcoming Climber / Power-Beaming competition (LaserMotive, the third contestant, is using a laser provided by DILAS).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb0cy-CMVWg[/youtube]

And, over at the official site of the Space Elevator Games, Ben Shelef has posted the definitive take on “What Went Wrong” during the latest round of testing.

Correcting the problem and moving forward (in Ben’s own words):

“We have engaged a new helicopter operator and are in the process of determining if they can do the job – we need to be more thorough on this aspect this time around. We are also pursuing other alternatives in order to make the next flight happen as soon as possible.  (But no sooner!)”

Note that this problem affected only the cable assembly testing, not the laser testing (which went splendidly).

And also note that this problem does not affect the other half of the Space Elevator Games, the Strong Tether competition, which will happen next week at the Space Elevator Conference (note that you must be a paid attendee of the conference in order to watch this competition – yet another reason to come to the conference!).

Stay tuned to this blog or the official site of the Space Elevator Games for all the latest news.

Over at the official website of the Space Elevator Games, Spaceward CEO Ben Shelef has recently posted some updates on events that occurred during the most recent week of testing at the NASA-Dryden facility.

These were posts that Ben started while the action was happening, but because his time get getting hijacked by mundane stuff such as getting things to work, he was unable to post them until very recently.  While some of these postings then are, in a sense, out-of-date, all are very interesting in that they show what the teams were doing (or not doing, as the case may be) during the testing week.

Check out his posts on the USST (here and here), the University of Alberta and the National Space Society (NSS) teams.

Please note that only 3 teams. USST, KCSP and LaserMotive, have qualified at this point to compete for the NASA-sponsored prize money.  I do not believe that any other teams will be added to this mix in the future as the qualification window for the Climber / Power-Beaming competition is now closed.