One million dollars! Not chump change, that’s for certain. That amount is the total prize money being awarded during the upcoming 2007 Space Elevator Games in Salt Lake City, Utah from October 19th through the 21st. NASA is funding the awards, all in the name of cutting-edge technology development. The space elevator, first proposed in the 1960s and then enhanced by Dr. Bradley Edwards of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is a system for Earth-to-space transportation. A stationary cable moves in unison with Earth. One end of the cable is anchored to the planet’s surface. The other end is in space and electric vehicles carrying cargo and passengers then travels up and down the cable.
For example, two of the seven challenges are the Beam Power Challenge and Tether Challenge. The Beam Power event offers participants to present their power distribution technologies for application to space exploration. The must develop, design and build a climber machine able to travel up and down a ribbon while carrying a payload. The climber must gain a height of around 330 feet, while moving at a minimum speed of 2 meters per second. The purse for this event is $500,000 and could be shared by as many as three successful teams.
The Tether Challenge looks for an extremely strong and lightweight material to be developed that could reduce rocket weight, offer an advance in solar sails, and tether-based propulsion systems. This, also, has a $500,000 prize. Ahhh, but the key here is that the tether must be at least 50 percent stronger than a baseline tether comprised of off-the-shelf materials—Salt Lake City, Utah—August 30, 2008
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