The first day of NASA's space elevator Centennial Challenge competition held at the Wirefly X Prize Cup at New Mexico's Las Cruces International airport ended with only one team reaching the top of the ribbon.
For a space elevator climbing machines capable of carrying payload must travel up a ribbon, theoretically all the way to orbit. The University of Michigan team's climbing machine reached the top of the competition's 164ft (50m) ribbon, which is held by a crane on the airport's flight line. The University of Michigan team's 19kg (42lb) Climber 1, which uses 21.5ft2 (2m2) of solar panels, reached the top of the ribbon in 360s.
Climber 1 is one of 15 teams' machines competing for the $200,000 of prizes on offer. Many of the other teams have solar panels on only one side of the climber, which gives the vehicle a centre of gravity off-set from the ribbon making the machine vulnerable to wind induced instability.
This year the three best teams will win $150,000, $40,000 and $10,000. Under the rules competing teams have to provide complete climbing systems, which have to scale the ribbon while carrying a payload using only power beamed to them from a light source.
Climbers will be rated according to their speed, payload and net weight. Competitors' climbing machines have to have a maximum net weight of 25 kg [55lb] and must ascend the ribbon at a minimum of 198ft/min (1m/s). Michigan's Climber 1 only achieved 27.3ft/min. The other 15 teams include USST from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada; the Turbo Crawler team from Max Born College in Ruhrarea, Germany; and the Recens team from the Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.
A space elevator is envisaged to be a 62,000mile (99,800km) long tether made from carbon nanotubes. The tether is connected from space to an ocean-based platform along the equator and is capable of lifting large payloads to geosynchronous orbit. The tether and the Earth rotate in unison, so the tether stays in place with respect to the planet’s surface.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
