It’s right out of NOVA or the scifi channel: Microsoft is sponsoring the 2009 Space Elevator Conference,
a four-day long event with movies, presentations, and workshops where
engineers and entrepreneurs gather to discuss the technical and
logistical issues of building an actual elevator to space.
“It’s bringing top people around to present ideas from a research
standpoint and a business standpoint,” said conference spokesperson
Melinda Young. “We’re talking about a way to supplement travel to space
by rockets.”
While the idea of a space elevator has been around for about 100 years, the idea became more feasible by the 1991 discovery of “carbon nanotubes,” tiny atoms that can come together and make a cylinder. The elevator is built around the idea of a ribbon and tether that could lift people thousands of miles into near space to a destination such as the International space station
Meanwhile, in
final proof that sports channels don’t know what the hell they’re
doing, for the last five years NASA and The Spaceward Foundation have
been running “The Space Elevator Games” - a competition to build a
robot and cable to literally CLIMB INTO SPACE - and TV still shows
skateboarding instead. The future is happening, and nobody’s watching.
Similar to the X Prize and the Google Lunar Prize, the Space
Elevator games are based on offering a big chunk of money to access the
incredible inventive potential available outside of established
agencies. The games attract university teams of student researchers,
the next generation of the field, with a total prize purse of four
million dollars. Which is more than you’ll get at the average track
meet.
The games have two events: climbing space cables, and
making them. The Climber battle is an awesome combination of
edge-pushing technologies as it requires lightweight cargo-carrying
robotics and power-beaming technology to drive them. As a model of an
actual space elevator, a cable into orbit, the machines can’t carry any
power source - they need to have energy transmitted to them. This
means that the games involve experimental robots climbing a one
kilometer cable suspended by a helicopter while high energy lasers fire
at them, or in other words, about five action movies happening at once.
The
second stage of the competition is building a the cable, or “tether”,
so the competition really is bootstrapping space elevation: they’re
working out how to build the cable and then climb it, aka “Most of the
stuff you need to get this scifi idea actually working.” While the
climbing prize is based on speed, the cable competition requires
continual improvement: to win the prize you have to do 50% better than
last years winner. If there’s ever been a better acceptance of
exponential technology acceleration we’ve yet to see it.
It’s an
awesome motivation for a whole new generation of scientists, and even
those who don’t win have an incredible boost in the field of “Thinking
of something awesome and making it happen.” Plus, with a $900,000
prize awarded at a climbing speed of 2 m/s (and the most recent record
being 1.8 m/s) sometime soon a student dorm is going to have the best
bigscreen in the world.
Luke McKinney
Space Elevation http://www.spaceward.org/elevator2010
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/176501.asp?from=blog_last3
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