No winner in 'space elevator' competition

[phantom power]

Not a very auspicious beginning. The real thing will have to make it up 23,000 miles. These guys didn't make it to the top of a crane. Guess I'll have to look forward to the next competition.

The seven "robot climbers" entered in the competition didn't ascend more than a few dozen feet up a tether attached to a giant crane, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reported, therefore none performed well enough to win the $50,000 grand prize.

Two teams developed space elevators that were able to rise along the tether using power converted from spotlights.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20051024-14070400-bc-us-spaceelevator.xml

[benburch]

1. The first steam locomotives were failures too...

Eventually they dominated the planet.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. steam helped, but diesel really kicked butt.

that is why nano robots will be the diesel to their steam.

[phantom power]

3. Every failure is a learning experience. I also didn't like the...

parameters of the competition. They used a super-high-wattage spotlight as the remote energy source. The heat from that spotlight was so intense that protection from heat was an actual design problem. And it's noncoherent light. So it's intensity diminishes as the inverse square of the distance. Really, it was a lousy power source, and in any case not at all close to any power source that could be used in the real thing. It would be more realistic to use something like a microwave laser.

[Phoonzang]

4. Eh, one failure.

They've just got to try and try again until they succeed. A space elevator is really neccesary for future space exploration. We can't keep blasting small payloads into orbit at great expense and expect there to be significant progress.

It's either a space elevator or anti-gravity, and as far as I know no one has a clear idea how to create the latter....

[On the Road]

5. I Thought There Were More Immediate Challenges

than creating light-powered machines to climb the tether. Maybe all these things are proceeding at the same time -- it just seemed to be putting the cart before the horse.

First, you need to develop mass quantities of a material strong enough to withstand the tremendous stresses that the tether will be under. The only material that may be strong enough to do that is buckeytubes, which now are able to be made only in small quantities and at great cost. Unless the tether is a single piece, the different parts have to be joined in a way that maintains the strength. Those are the biggest hurdles.

After that the material has to be transported into space. Since the tether will be flexible, it can't be built from the ground up. Don't know how many trips on the space shuttle that will mean.

Once those obstacles are overcome, the light-powered (or laser-powered) climbers will probably be available.

[phantom power]

6. As you say, they are trying to proceed in parallel.

The subsidiary company "LiftPort Carbon" is working on the materials. Their strategy is to commercialize carbon nanotube composites for (hopefully) lucrative earthbound applications, and use the proceeds to fund the Big Kahuna: developing the technology for manufacturing a ribbon of CNT composite ~30K miles long. And with the required tensile strength to mass ratio to hang from GSO.