Five groups of Canadian university students will be visiting Utah this weekend 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.
Representatives 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 Oct. 19-21 near Salt Lake City, Utah.
To win, teams have to design, build, and successfully test a robot that will climb a ribbon — essentially a vertical tether suspended from a crane or scaffolding apparatus — in a certain amount of time. Teams power their robotic climbers with a beam of light; receivers on the robot climber convert the light to electricity to power its motors.
The idea of the 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.
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 two metres-per-second takes home the pot. Though that doesn't sound very fast, the University of Saskatchewan team (USST) had the fastest climber last year, but ultimately failed to win the competition because they did not satisfy the speed requirements — 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."
The University if Saskatchewan tem is in good company, though. No team has yet to win the competition, and consequently the stakes keep getting bigger. Last year's purse will be rolled into this year's prize and the winner, if there is one, will take home $500,000. USST are confident that they can pull it off, 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," Mr. Ruszkowski wrote.
The UBC team, last year's favourites to win, have changed their tactics in order to learn from 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 in an email.
The team is 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 that 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. 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.
"One of the major purposes of the Centennial Challenge is to identify new and innovative sources of technologies," he said in an interview with theSpaceShow.com in February.
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 (U.S.) — 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."
