Throwing Cable (in May)

Written by Tom Nugent on Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The LaserMotive team has been very active preparing for this year’s power beaming competition. Because so many elements of the competition have changed from last year, there has been a lot of redesigning going on. One of the biggest changes was when Spaceward switched the vertical “racetrack” from a rubber ribbon to a steel cable. We looked at many possible methods of gripping and climbing the cable, and prototyped a couple of them.

We don’t want to disclose our choice for gripping the cable just yet, but we’d like to show that we have been “throwing cable” quite a bit. The video below was originally taken in early May. We may not have stated it explicitly before, but we are aiming for the full $2 million prize in 2008, which means we need to travel 5 m/s on average. So this video shows our prototype throwing roughly 100 feet of cable in about 6 seconds, which translates to approximately 5 m/s.

Even more progress has been made since that video, and I’m planning to post more about what’s happened next week. We’re excited with all of the progress we’ve been making on the vehicle, as well as other components, and we’re looking forward to the competition!