Space Elevator Blog, E-T-C, and Trumpf

The Space Elevator Blog has a detailed interview with laser supplier Trumpf. They're in the business of (among other things of course) helping the Space Elevator Games laser teams. The post goes into some ideas on how a laser source could be designed to work at the distances and with the focus needed at altitudes relevant to a Space Elevator.

The discussion suggests a third Space Elevator Games challenge - cooling the beam power receiver in the vacuum of space.

The details of what Trumpf is offering to the teams are also discussed.

The blog also has a post on a video of E-T-C, one of the beam power teams. It looks like they must have stopped off at in New Mexico at the space museum along the way?

Unreasonable Post Trio

Unreasonable Rocket shows us the damage from the last crash of the helicopter, then restarts flights, and finally endures rain delays just like the giant rockets.

Political Links

Since this site does occasionally cover politics as it pertains to space prizes (for example, see the Politics tag below for other posts related to politics, and the Politics section on the right), I thought I'd follow the lead of Action for Space in this political season in the U.S. and add some relevant links on the right. These include email contacts for Presidential candidates in a new "Political Contacts" section and links to a couple of prize-related bills in the "Politics" section. I won't comment on the specifics of candidates or bills now (I have, however, discussed some of them in past posts). To keep neutral the candidate lists are in alphabetical order.

Of course emails and phone calls, while convenient, aren't the most effective way to express whatever your political convictions are. For example, candidates respond much better to personal contact like ProSpace's March Storm or, as Jim Muncy noted in this Space Show interview, volunteering in a campaign and influencing it from within.

Ames and the Future City Competition

Spaceref presents a press release about the National Engineers Week Future City Competition for middle school students. The competition involves skills like teamwork, computer software like SimCity, presentations, math, and engineering. NASA Ames is hosting the Northern California regional competition.

Rocket Magazines

The Rocket Dungeon reviews 3 recent issues of rocket magazines: Rockets Magazine, Sport Rocketry, and LAUNCH Magazine. Competitions with prizes that are mentioned include the Team America Rocketry Challenge and the 2007 X PRIZE Cup. I just got my issue of LAUNCH today, so I can't give any comments of my own about it yet.

Armadillo Vehicle Updates and Plans

RLV News posts on the latest of Armadillo Aerospace's very comprehensive every-month-or-so updates, complete with photos and videos.

Lots of Big Donations for Methuselah Foundation

The Methuselah Foundation has been getting a lot of donations lately. It sounds like most of them are for traditional grants focused on the Foundation's anti-aging goals, but some of them are directed towards the Mprize, which has the same goals, but uses a different approach to achieve them.

Odyssey Moon at Accelerating Space Conference

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Robert Richards from Google Lunar X PRIZE team Odyssey Moon would be at the Accelerating Space Conference; now RLV News has a summary by guest John Kavanagh of his presentation.

JSC-1A Sandbox Opportunity

Is anyone interested in renting 8 tons of JSC-1A lunar regolith simulant?

Update (Feb 1): RLV News has this in a convenient format in case you find (as I do) PDF format to have some drawbacks.

The Speculist on Large Space Prizes

The Speculist posts on push prizes and getting to the Moon. It's in favor of relatively modest (in aerospace terms) space prizes like the Centennial Challenges, but suggests that the boundary where prizes are too ambitious is somewhere around the difficulty of the Lunar X PRIZE because there's a threshold of difficulty where challenges are too difficult for small teams, and large corporations with stockholder requirements can't risk going after the prizes.

I think there's probably a great deal of truth to this line of thinking. However, an extremely difficult prize can be designed to reduce this effect, for example by increasing the prize reward, reducing the risk by including second and third place prizes, including incremental sub-prizes that are stepping stones towards the big goal, and/or orienting the prize towards a goal that businesses would find attractive to address (just not quite enough to go after it without the prize) because of market potential. Another way of thinking about it is that there's no harm in offering a large prize even if you as the sponsor think there's only a 10% chance of anyone achieving the goal, since you don't have to pay if noone wins, and some of the competitors may make useful progress towards the goal even if they don't win.

The post links to a number of earlier posts from the same site on space prizes, such as this one that's only a day old about the organization in the space science community for a change in the Vision for Space Exploration to focus on astronomical satellite servicing at Lagrange points and exploring asteroids instead of the Moon. In that post, prizes are seen as a third alternative.

More on Stardance

I posted earlier about Stardance; you can find the prize connections in that post. This post is just a follow-up to let you know that the news continues to appear at the Stardance Blog. Here's more video than we originally saw of the graceful first Zero-G dance of the project, and here's a TV interview on it. Keep checking there for the latest.

Prizes, Diversity, and the Space Industry

William Pomerantz at the X PRIZE Foundation has some ideas about prizes and diversity. The post includes a personal story about coming to America and joining the space industry by Diana Trujillo. The Lunar Lander Challenge, Google Lunar X PRIZE, and RoboCup are all featured in the post.

Physical Crashes But No Software Crashes at Unreasonable

Unreasonable Rocket gives the details on some model helicopter crashes and updates to an Open Source helicopter simulator that now goes through the Lunar Lander Challenge steps.

Update (Jan 25): There are new posts at Unreasonable Rocket showing new GPS boards that arrived and another frustrating crash.

Designing for the V Prize

Gravity Loss does some calculations and engineering design related to the V Prize. A lunar lander challenge competitor is among the commenters.

CAFE News on General Aviation Technology Challenge

The CAFE Foundation has made a number of updates related to the General Aviation Technology Challenge:

• a list of engines and fuels that may be of use to GAT Challenge teams
• a link to a paper on alternative fuels for commercial aviation
• links on ultracapacitors that may be useful in achieving the GAT Challenge goals
• a note on a CAFE Foundation lecture to a University of California, Davis Aeronautical Engineering class where the students may rise to the Challenge
• the GAT Challenge FAQ

It's all here on the CAFE News page.