Power Beaming For UAVs and Space Elevators 137
An anonymous reader writes "The idea of power beaming — using lasers or microwaves to transmit usable energy over great distances — has been around for decades. But recent advances in cheaper, more energy-efficient diode lasers have made power beaming commercially viable. LaserMotive, based in Kent, WA, is best known for winning the Level 1 prize of the NASA Power Beaming Challenge at the Space Elevator Games last November. In a new interview with Xconomy, LaserMotive co-founder Tom Nugent, who previously worked on the 'photonic fence' mosquito-zapping project at Intellectual Ventures, talks about gearing up for Level 2 of the NASA competition, slated for later this year. What's more, LaserMotive is trying to build a real business around beaming power to unmanned aerial vehicles, remote sensors and military bases, and other locations where it's impractical to run a wire, change batteries, or truck in fuel. The ultimate goal is to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth."
Sounds cool (Score:3, Informative)
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all the recent news of NASA being marginalized
You should look at where you're getting your news from.
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heh! I try to make Slashdot less retarded but I am just one man.
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I'm surprised that with all the recent news of NASA being marginalized that they can still have competitions like this? Or have I just got the wrong impression of the state of NASA's future?
The prizes are tiny compared to NASAs budget, and save them a lot of time and resources.
They get multiple groups working on something and only have to pay the prize to the best, so I'd say it's pretty efficient for them. Not so much for the teams that don't win though.
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It's productive for all the teams though.. having a clear focus, competition and a cash prize to win does a lot to drive productivity.
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2. merely patenting something doesn't make you money
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whats the t&c's on these competitions? you might find anything you invent for the comp isn't your property
You may be completely ignorant of the Centennial Challenges program too..
Having actually spoken with competitors I can tell you that they all say they're glad they entered the competition even when they don't win.
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more power to NASA if they can find suckers to do their work for peanuts though...
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I hate to tell you this, but it's usually not financially great for the person who wins either. The prize hardly ever covers the development costs. From a purely "let's start a team to win the prize" standpoint its a really dumb idea. Now, if you have a clue, you'll be wondering why *anyone* enters the competition. For the answer to that question, read the article... the activity that the prize is an incentive for is commercially interesting. Without the prize, people would still be interested in it bu
Re:Sounds cool (Score:5, Interesting)
From:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428439main_Space_technology.pdf [nasa.gov]
"The return on investment with prizes is exceptionally high as NASA expends no funds unless the
accomplishment is demonstrated."
Am I the only one thinking that perhaps they should structure more government contracts like this?
With a focus on "expends no funds unless the accomplishment is demonstrated".
Which I would have thought should be a requirement for all government contracts but sadly is not.
It increases the risk to the companies involved but that just means you need to make the winnings pot a decent size.
Stop fucking around with these tiny little prizes of 1 or 2 million dollars and offer pots that would make a venture capitalist salivate( like 500 million dollars for the bellow)
"put at least one human being on the moon and bring him back to earth safely and collect *list of samples* and place *list of scientific equipment* on the lunar surface"
For comparison:
the space shuttle: 115 missions (as of 6 August 2006) - total cost $150 billion
at the moment prize pots seem to always be trivial quantities of money compared to the rest of the budget.
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The contractor needs your money to complete the project. But I agree that a substantial component of the monetary award for completing a project should be based on the project's successful completion. Ask us Californians how we like still paying for a failed computing systems upgrade at the DMV sometime. Especially since it's been many years since, now.
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Here's a 150 contracts to put a shuttle-load's worth of personnel and cargo into low Earth orbit and return them safely to Earth. $500K a pop, payable upon successful completion.
crickets chirping...
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Pah. The way the entrepreneurial mind works: Oh I wish I could do something with rockets but it's all so hard and I don't know if I can make a go of it. Hey, is that John Carmack the guy who wrote Doom flying rockets to win a million dollar prize? Wow, I can do better than him, I've actually got an aerospace degree! Quits job, starts company.
Prizes serve the same purpose as early customers: they take startups out of stealth mode and announce their business plan to the world. Other entrepreneurs see th
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Jerry Pournelle's been beating that drum for years.
Whaaa! I demand guaranteed success!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
If everyone had your attitude, we would still be living in caves in Africa.
Don't push the boundaries, and stay in your mom's basement for all I care.
But your display of your lack of adventure/exploration/curiosity paints you into a corner from my view.
*hyperbole warning*
Real men with balls are explorers, always pushing the boundaries.
Real men have the balls to attempt and fail, learning something, and trying again.
Real men don't give up until they see their vision through, or die.
*end hyperbole*
Humans are renowned for their curiosity, and the mental capacity to satisfy that inherit curiosity.
Therefore, by my straw-man reasoning, I have deduced that you are subhuman. ;-)
Your type contribute nothing to our world. You're just leeches; a detriment to our society/species/world.
Win or lose, you should applaud their effort[or turn in your geek/nerd card and STFU]. We all benefit, directly, or indirectly.
There is a reason Star Trek had such an affect on society/industry/science.
"To boldly go where no man has gone before.."
That appealed directly to our species sense of adventure/curiosity.
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*hyperbole warning*
Real men with balls are explorers, always pushing the boundaries.
Real men have the balls to attempt and fail, learning something, and trying again.
Real men don't give up until they see their vision through, or die.
*end hyperbole*
I'll add a few more:
Real men leave the toilet seat up after use.
Real men never preheat the oven when cooking an instant pizza.
Real men like to hang their clothes on the hooks on the floor.
YES! I'm your MOM!
Now clean your room before you go off exploring or you will be grounded!
FOREVER.
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Plus, Kirk always got the hot chicks.
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You could have saved yourself all that work, and just pointed to “crab mentality [wikipedia.org]”. ^^
One thing you missed, is where GP’s position comes from: Efficiency. Simple as that. Is it worth it? ;])
(See, you always get further, when you really understand what you oppose, instead of being ignorant. Also being nice trumps being arrogant. [Where I seem to fail too.
I think what is the deciding factor here, is if your initial experiences with risking something were good or bad. Initial, because later s
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I don't think they're really being that marginalized. The Constellation program (which I assuming is the source of most of the marginalization talk) wasn't making effective use of money and wasn't delivering much. But with no plans to replace it (at least that I've heard of) manned space travel definitely seems to be being put on the back burner.
Beyond that though, holding competitions like this is a great use of their budget. The rewards they give are relatively small compared to what it would take to deve
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I'm more surprised as to why this anonymous reader is advertising LaserMotive so much. It starts out talking about the competition and so-on, but in the end it ends up focusing exclusively on LaserMotive.
Unless, of course, LaserMotive is going to bring out a new product and they're trying to get some astroturfing in so in the future we'll be all "Oh hey, that's that innovative new company with the power and the beaming and the nasa winnings and so forth."
Or maybe I'm just a cynical bastard. Oh well!
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In our heart of hearts, yes.
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>>After all, everyone on slashdot is in the market for a multi million dollar laser.
>In our heart of hearts, yes.
Especially if it's attached to the head of a frickin' shark...
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I'm surprised that with all the recent news of NASA being marginalized that they can still have competitions like this? Or have I just got the wrong impression of the state of NASA's future?
As QuantumG said, you should probably read better news sources. ;) NASA's budget is actually being increased under the FY2011 budget, which you can read here:
http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html [nasa.gov]
Although all of NASA is getting an overall boost, the Centennial Challenges prize competitions like the ones in the summary are getting a particularly large boost. I believe they only got $4 million in FY09 and $0 in FY10 (yay for Ares cost overruns eating everything else in the budget), but from FY2011-FY2015
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Professional courtesy.
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have you tasted lawyers?
I wouldn't feed them to my pet hamster..
Trying to build a real business? (Score:2)
Beaming power down from space? (Score:5, Funny)
Simple enough - just have a satellite convert it into powerful microwaves which you then beam down to reflector dishes. It works great! But you have to be careful, as occasionally the satellite gets out of whack and cooks large portions of your town.
That, or Godzilla. Unless you've turned disasters off.
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Or pop lots of popcorn.
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It was called "oops" in the original...
I mean really, what could go wrong when sending massive amounts of energy through the air?
Re:Beaming power down from space? (Score:4, Insightful)
>I mean really, what could go wrong when sending massive amounts of energy through the air?
Well looking at an existing experiment doing just that... a random planet can have multiple elements starting to behave in highly abherent ways, self-replicate, become self-aware and call itself "life" ? You do realize that, that is exactly what the sun does every single day right ?
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Yeah well, except that our plan is to put a giant lens (or lens-equivalent photoelectric system) between us and the sun, and fry us like ants, when we miss the tiny tiny dish.
It all comes down to the amount of energy. Just like it’s the amount of something that makes it toxic. You can die from drinking simple (bottled/tap) water, if you drink enough of it.
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And you can die from too much exposure to the sun right now. It causes melanoma's, too little, and you die from a vitamin-D deficiency.
I'm quite sure we can't build any technology that could actually beam more known harmful radioactive energy at us than the sun already does, what the technology does propose to do is to send it to a targeted location even when that location is currently pointed away from the sun (e.g. nighttime). It's not the amount it increases, but the availability. Trust me, no reasonable
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A space elevator is not a building. Current designs would be a ribbon 10cm wide and thinner than a piece of paper.
In how it works it'd be more like a rope hanging down from space essentially tied down at a geosynchronous orbit (by another large mass/force beyond geosynchronous orbit). You cut it near that point and the whole thing must fall down like any other untied rope. There is no section that can stand up under compression because it'd be pointless to do that.
If you cut it low down than the only sectio
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IANAS, but the idea of a space elevator is that not only will the "cable" be held up by the centrifugal force of spinning around the earth, but Space elevators do not exist because we haven't discovered/invented a material which can withstand the tremendous force of spinning in a circle. If a space elevator were to fail, I think the worst scenario would be the elevator goes drifting out into space.
Even if the cable were to fall to the earth, the reason re-entry creates so much friction is that spacecraft ar
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> Unless it was sent whipping around the earth by some external force, it would simply fall down.
No it wouldn't just fall down.
When a figure skater pulls his/her arms in, the figure skater spins faster. Why?
Because everything wants to keep moving at the same speed, and the stuff further from the center is moving faster than the stuff nearer.
So when the bits of the elevator are pulled in,
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Are they just gonna launch a massive spool of "cable" into orbit and unroll it?
Yep. Except it would be more of a ribbon than a cable.
Cause until the earth end gets attached to the earth, it seems to me that any gust of wind or slight deflection in the cable will cause it to swing like the largest pendulum ever, possibly cutting a miles long swath of destruction in the process.
Nope. The cable/ribbon would be less than a meter wide, and only the thickness of a sheet of paper. It could cause no more damage than a piece of plastic blowing in the wind. But as you said, getting it to the spot you want it would be a little tricky if there is much of any wind at all.
Plus if the orbital station is only held in place by the tension of the cable holding it to earth, and the cable only remains taut by the inertia of the orbital station orbiting slightly faster than escape velocity, which one do you build first? Kind of a chicken or the egg problem IMHO.
You build both at the same time. The "station"/counterweight would just be the satellite that un-spooled the cable. Actually, the cable would likely be made of many
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1970 - Caldwell, NJ - mystery thread hanging from the sky [weirdnj.com]
follow-up [weirdnj.com]
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Earth has an atmosphere much ticker than Mars. A space elevator falling would create a marvelous strip of fire across the sky but not much would be left of it to hit the ground.
Also, a space elevator would probably have the density and thickness of cardboard. A lot stronger to tear apart mind you but the parts not high enough to burn up would not fall straight down like a rock. So they'd gently float down onto the uninhabited ocean that surrounds the space elevator. Same for any other pieces that survive re
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Some of the crawlers attached to it might leave unpleasant carters but probably not much damage either.
Like Jimmy Carter? He was much before my time, but I guess a lot of people found him unpleasant.
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If you had two cables, insulated like spacey twinlead, then you could use dc to say vhf for power.
If you had one insulated cable, then with two exponential feedhorns, you would have a "G-Line" that would get rf up the cable to the elevator.
--
"Snotty beamed me twice last night." Spaceballs
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You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
You take the blue pill and your penis stays erect for hours and hours, if your heart can take it.
From the actual advert^h^h^h article... (Score:1)
Perhaps "have made" and "commercially viable" don't mean what I think they do.
Solar Power? (Score:1, Troll)
The ultimate goal is to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth
Last I checked, within their life span solar cells on earth don't pay for themself, or barely pay for themself. Presumably the advantage to harnessing solar power in space is the increased intensity of light without the interference of the earth's atmosphere. But solar panels aside, building and launching satellites is expensive, and this laser transfer of energy has unavoidable energy losses. One has to wonder if this could work out to be economically viable without some other serious technological breakth
Please at least attempt to be serious (Score:4, Informative)
We've got these things called integrated circuits and microprocessors now that meant we're using high purity silicon in bulk and the price has fallen to the point that solar cells are in cheap novelty garden lights.
I suggest "checking" again.
I don't really understand where the "lifespan" thing comes from since there's still panels from the 1970s running. Please elaborate and tell me what modes of failure make you think they have a short lifespan?
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Show me the energy costs, including extraction, installation, maintenance, oh, and keeping the people who do all those things alive so that they can keep doing them indefinitely.
Because with a coal mine you've got none of those costs, right?
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Well yeah nuclear fission is great. It is the only viable alternative to coal we have. Hydropower comes close but the amount of places you can build it is quite limited, mostly already exploited, and they use a lot of land area.
As for crystalline solar photovoltaic cells you would be surprised. I know people like to say silicon wafers are made from sand, but the fact is it is not that simple... First you need to separate the silica in the sand (it's the glassy quartz like bits). This is probably near the
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It's more like what you might have seen with a plastic model aeroplane kit with the bits between the parts. Crystallisation is actually initiated on something that solidifies into a rod leading into the main casting. It's done that way to ensure both that it's a single crystal and that the crystal is orientated in exactly the direction yo
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You really need to look at waste and emissions as well.
Sadly, everyone thinks Nuclear waste is like it's shown on the Simpsons. IN fact, most people don'y know how little waste there is.
Industrial Solar Thermal allows for storage of Solar gathered energy through the night.
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Since Solar advocates always compare to coal, then it's only fair that other power generation system also compare to coal.
And 4th Gen Nuclear would go a long way to solving are energy problems.
As would Industrial Solar Thermal and roof top solar.
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We know - from our continuing existence - that coal provides more energy than it uses to obtain it. Does photovoltaic? I'm concerned that it doesn't, and the problem is that it'll take us another 30 years or so to find out that we've committed to a Sisyphian task.
Failure at being serious (Score:2)
The main dollar cost was melting the silicon and keeping it molten during purification. It turns out that it's vastly more efficient to do that in bulk, so you reduce both energy and dollar costs because they are very closely correlated.
Nice to see all those extra little bits added on that don't get added on when other forms of energy are considered - keeping people alive on that list as well? Care to add in airfares for holidays, energy cost to fabricate the planes and to ma
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Keeping people alive is "irrelevant bullshit"? See, that response is exactly why I am concerned that photovoltaic is a cult rather than a solution.
Curious that you think the "irrelevant bullshit" isn't a consideration for other forms of energy generation. Of course it is. Only a brainwashed retard would suggest otherwise. Our continued existence proves that fossil fuels provide more energy than they take to obtain, plus enough extra for super-"irrelevant bullshit", like the devices we use to have this
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Ah, the "for the children" distraction has surfaced despite being a million miles from the topic, and the personal insults (retard etc).
Save that shit for the playground and act like the adult you are supposed to be.
Since you've modelled it with ever expanding costs there are only two possible answers - the entire worlds economy or telling you to grow up and consider it seriously.
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To be fair, you may just be very drunk, instead of so retarded that you are unable to understand that accusing someone of spewing "irrelevant bullshit" is the opening move in the "for the children" gambit.
Speaking of which, you don't have the energy numbers, do you? It's OK, I'll wait while you try and find them, since they're the only thing that matter. Good luck with that.
Two year payback is not forever is it? (Score:2)
Now if you were serious instead of playing a silly game of insulting strangers and making everyone think you are stupid you would have googled for something about e
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Yes, serious technological breakthroughs are required for solar power sats to work. Increasing the efficiency of solar collectors, reducing their mass, and reducing launch costs are all required. But that's the normal case for anything space-based.
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Last I checked, within their life span solar cells on earth don't pay for themself, or barely pay for themself.
Solar panels could repay the cost of their production within 7 years in the 1970s. I'll provide a citation just as soon as you do (I can't find it right now. I thought I had it saved in my scrapbook, but maybe that was an old one.)
Ultimate goal? (Score:5, Funny)
The ultimate goal is to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth
Isn't that handled by...y'know...the sun?
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Isn't that handled by...y'know...the sun?
Yes. That goal was fulfilled a few billion years ago and isn't talked about anymore.
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The ultimate goal is to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth
Isn't that handled by...y'know...the sun?
Well, yes. But the sun is kind of indiscriminate about it and seems to have this tendency to, you know, "spread the power".
Building satellites that concentrate and beam the power will ensure that only the right people get lots of power and the rest of us are kept in the dark.
They have it wrong (Score:2)
Kills mosquitos.... hmmmmm (Score:1)
I don't understand this for space elevators (Score:2)
Even the huge potential difference as such a long conductor goes through different portions of the atmosphere is probably going to give you more power than you can get there unless you have an enormous and heavy parabolic dish.
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mosquito zapping thing (Score:2)
Who cares about power beaming, I'm still tying to find a link on where to buy that great mosquito zapping thing..
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYXPqrXZ1eU [youtube.com]
Don your tinfoil hats ... now (Score:2)
Excellent, this will be more fodder for the "electromagnetic harassment [youtube.com]" nutters!
A noble effort, but... (Score:5, Funny)
"Tom Nugent...previously worked on the 'photonic fence' mosquito-zapping project at Intellectual Ventures..."
I understand the photonic fence project hit a wall during tests held just North of Winnipeg. Three mosquitoes (described by locals as "undersized" and "early season weaklings") came out of the bush, trashed the equipment and kicked the living shit out of two researchers. A German Shepherd-Pit Bull cross brought in to keep bears out of the scientists' camp was dragged off by the insects and never seen again.
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Heard, you sure you weren't watching SyFy? (Score:2)
that sounds right up their alley, complete with rubber mosquitoes.
Top it off with about forty seven minutes of commercials per hour and...
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Re:A noble effort, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Was I the only one who read that as Ted Nugent?
In any case, I worked in the mosquito control field for years, and his claims for the fence were not only bogus, they were *typically* bogus: " The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.'"
Right. That's one of the standard claims of the mosquito control crackpot. People have been making this claim for decades, but there's only one known way to identify a mosquito species: you put the specimen under a microscope and have somebody trained in mosquito taxonomy study it. This is done *routinely* by mosquito control districts who set up trap networks to assess human exposure. A system that could identify mosquito species electronically in real time would be worth tens of millions of dollars per year in the US alone.
If he could prove that one capability alone, I'd gladly mortgage my house for a stake in a business to produce *just the identification piece* -- much less the mosquito killing laser. But it's obviously the kind of claim a crackpot would make. I'm not saying that it is physically impossible to do what he claims, but it is so far beyond the capability of current technology that I'd have to conclude this guy is a crackpot.
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Jordin -- That's *exactly* the same claim that has been made since the 1950s and *repeatedly* been shown to be bogus. Wing beat frequency has never been shown to be statistically distinct between species or even genera.
Even distinction to genera would be highly valuable because you could tell by context what species. If you had a residential neighborhood next to a salt marsh and you detected Aedes after a spring tide, you'd be reasonably certain that you were dealing with Ae. taeniorhynchus or Ae solicitan
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My point is you need to do a real controlled study that will determine the system's real capabilities. If you take a large enough sample you'll probably get a significant difference in mean frequency, but if you plot the spectrum the overlap will show that the dominant harmonic has little practical utility.
Your post inspired me to look up the literature on this, and the most credible papers analyze the signal spectrum, albeit usually by crude means. It may be possible to extract behavioral cues as well.
I
Reference provided here (Score:2)
This is a recent paper from UC Davis on distinguishing Anopheles (the genus that spreads malaria) by spectral analysis: The “Wingbeat Hypothesis” of Reproductive Isolation Between Members of the Anopheles gambiae Complex (Diptera: Culicidae) Does Not Fly [bioone.org].
Note this *does* seem to imply the possibility of distinguishing genera. There is one paper I found that claims a 72% success rate in distinguishing Ae solicitans, Cx pipiens pallus and Cx pipiens quinquefasciatus, but it is not published in a b
Microwave oops (Score:2)
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If the powersat is in geosynchronous orbit (UNLIKELY!), then the problem simplifies to "make sure the airliner doesn't fly over a particular section of ground". We do this all the time. It is called "restricted airspace". There's a chunk over Camp David, there's a chunk over Groom Lake (Area 51).
If the powersat is in low Earth orbit (far more likely), then the problem simplifies to "make sure the airliner doesn't fly through a moving region of airspace". We do this all the time, too. It is called "main
Late ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Patent alert ! (Score:2, Informative)
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> If there is any link between this project and Intellectual Ventures, it is
> doomed to stay in a box.
Because we all know that there is no money to be made from charging people for the right to practice an invention, don't we? Whereas if you keep it in a box, never practicing it and never allowing anyone else to practice it: well, it's obvious. The billions will just roll in. I wonder how it is that all the other inventors throughout history have never stumbled upon this business model?
solar power to Earth? (Score:1, Redundant)
Err, doesn't the sun already do that?
Space Elevators are (Score:2)
this centuries flying cars.
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We will beam down solar power from the space elevator to power our flying cars! Come on, it's the 21st century fer chrissake!
Actually, the reason the military / intelligence community is interested in using a small-scale version of this to power nano-drones to spy on Osama bin Laden.
He is a dazzler (Score:2)