Going for the record…

The Kansas City Space Pirates are going to be going for an unofficial record this coming weekend, the record set by LaserMotive Technologies in late October of 2010.  What LaserMotive did then was make a quadrocopter (an AscTec Pelican) fly continuously for 12 hours and 27 minutes. powered solely by laser beam.  A video of that flight can be found on the LaserMotive website.

Brian Turner, captain of the Kansas City Space Pirates writes the following:

All is set for this weekends record attempt. You can tune in live and check it out at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/brianturner

Launch is set for Friday 6:30 PM CDT We plan to fly till 6:30 pm Sunday. The previous record of 12 hours 27 minutes should be passed at about 7 am Saturday.

Helping me with this record are Chad, Don, Frank, Quinn, Ravi, and Joe. Ustream has a chat function that we will be active on during the flight.

If you visit the ustream channel, you can see a couple of videos from previous tests run by the Space Pirates.

Ah, this brings back memories of the “glory years” of power-beaming competitions, culminating in the victorious run by LaserMotive.

I’ll be posting further news as I receive it – good luck to Brian and his team!

(The picture thumbnail is picture of the KCSP computer screen with the quadcopter’s view of the hall – click on it to see a larger version.)

One thought on “Going for the record…

  1. Pingback: Space-for-All at HobbySpace » Sci-Tech: An attempt to laser beam power a flying quadcopter for 2 days

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