We have been hard at work for the last week revamping the LaserMotive website to highlight our growth from only competing in the NASA-sponsored Power Beaming competition, to a commercial endeavor pursuing near-term commercial power beaming. The new site will contain much more information about LaserMotive’s vision of the future of power beaming.

Check back next week to see the completely new look!

It’s no secret that one critical factor in the 2009 competition success of LaserMotive came from extensive testing of the climber at the team’s facility on the specially designed vertical treadmill, which allows the team the opportunity to collect real time data on Otis’s performance, as well as seeing how the machine performs over a full kilometer test without having to leave the office.

Like a car taking practice laps on a racetrack, the treadmill allows the team a chance to test new ideas and combinations to find out what works the best before the actual race begins.

And with a bigger, better goal and prize on the line for Phase 2, it was time for a better treadmill.

Back in January, the entire team took a quick break from working on their individual systems to help topple the 18-foot treadmill, tipping it on to its side to begin work. It is the first time in a year that the giant piece of machinery came down, leaving something of an empty space in the back corner of the team’s shop.

The formerly vertical treadmill. Watch your head!

The plan is to retrofit the treadmill to include a motor-driven wheel that will allow the team to measure the output of the climbing vehicle’s motor, effectively turning the treadmill into a dynamometer.

In addition, the bicycle wheels that guide the cable around the treadmill are being replaced with double-walled wheels to cut down on vibrations created when the cable passes over the spots where the spokes connect to the rims. Such vibrations may not seem like something that could cause such a major difference, but the more accurate the data you can gather, the better your vehicle will be. One of the wheels is also being put on a moving axis to allow the team to control the tension on the cable, which despite being metal can stretch, changing the conditions on the treadmill. Because the cable is a fixed length, the addition of the fifth wheel requires the top of the treadmill to also be lowered some to accommodate the new, wider path of the cable.

It’s a lot of work, but the ability of the team to test and retest the climber in conditions that simulate the real world challenge and make the adjustments based on test results instead of theories is one of the things that helped LaserMotive claim the Level 1 prize in November.

Now the hope is the new and improved treadmill can help get Otis into tip-top shape when the team goes after the Level 2 prize later this year!

As we mentioned before, NASA held a technical symposium and recognition ceremony on February 25th and 26th for all the 2009 Centennial Challenge winners and the allied organizations which ran the competitions. Twitter comments were at #nasacc. Will Pomerantz from the X-Prize Foundation wrote a great summary of the event.

During the Power Beaming session on the 25th, Jordin and Tom gave a presentation on LaserMotive’s technology development for the competition, and the directions we see power beaming going in the future. We were joined in that session by Brian Turner from KCSP, and Ben Shelef from the Spaceward Foundation.

The presentations from the other Challenges were uniformly interesting. As Will Pomerantz commented, it seemed to be true for every competition that “the teams that shared the most information with the general public eventually won the competition.” Over the last few years, we tried sharing what we were doing, and I’d like to work on sharing even more this year. The biggest obstacle is time.

It was interesting, in the middle of the day during the symposium, to hear NASA’s new Chief Technologist, Bob Braun, speak about his new job and his thoughts on the future. And as I tweeted, it was very refreshing to hear someone in his position admit that he didn’t have an answer to a question and, rather than making something up or being non-committal, he said he would work on finding an answer.

The next day was the recognition ceremony. We were honored to be recognized by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

We’re all excited to hear the messages coming from both Chief Technology Braun and Administrator Bolden. They both seem to “get it” and are working to move NASA in the direction of innovating new technologies and supporting industry as they try to innovate, rather than simply operating ‘traditional’ systems. We have high hopes for what we’ll see coming out of NASA in the next few years.

After the ceremony, teams from all the various Challenges got up on stage for one big group photo:

Many thanks to NASA IPP DIrector Doug Comstock and Centennial Challenges Director Andrew Petro for all their hard work for the event!

Tell most people that you are going to Washington, D.C., in February and they’re liable to look at you like you’ve got two heads, but that’s exactly where the majority of the LaserMotive team and their families are headed this week.

As winners of the NASA-sponsored 2009 Power Beaming Competition, LaserMotive is being honored this week at NASA Headquarters, along with other winners of the space agency’s Centennial Challenges, NASA’s prize-driven innovation program.

First Jordin and Tom will be speaking as part of a day-long technical symposium Feb. 25th, discussing LaserMotive’s 2009 competition win along with what we’ll be doing next, as part of a panel with the other Challenge winners.

Then, the next day, the whole team will be honored at a recognition ceremony with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, which is all just really cool.

But the guys aren’t just headed out go sight-seeing. While in D.C., team members will be meeting with technology staffers from the offices of our senators and congresspeople, explaining the business of power beaming and the vast potential it holds for each of their districts.

You know, in case they are looking to get on board with an emerging industry in their own backyard. Hey it’s already created two jobs, right?

Both the tech symposium and the recognition ceremony are scheduled to be broadcast on NASA Television. For the link, schedule and streaming video visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. The symposium is scheduled for 9 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Feb. 25 and the one-hour recognition ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. Feb. 26.

Or: “How to lose 15 percent of your body weight in 24 hours.”

(This article goes into more detail than our earlier post on happened for the final day of the 2009 power beaming competition.)

After securing the prize for successfully completing Level 1 of the Power Beaming Challenge by climbing the 1 km at a pace of 3.8 meters per second (nearly twice the required 2 m/s), the LaserMotive team pulled out all the stops in an attempt to qualify for the Level 2 prize and take home the additional $1.1 million in prize money.

Level 2 requires the climbers to complete the challenge at a pace of 5 meters per second and the team knew the only way to do that would be for Otis to drop some weight.

Not even the metal on the photovoltaic cells survived the mad dash to drop weight.

At a svelte 5 kg, there wasn’t a whole lot of fat to trim, but with no time to develop the proper package of diet and exercise, the decision was made to start simply removing as much excess material as possible.

Turning a critical eye, the team began removing all non-essential equipment and even cutting into the frame and trimming everything, from the circuit boards to various data-collection devices added to help the team learn as much as possible about their tries.

But with the money on the line, the team decided it was more important to drop some weight and make a run at the prize than anything else. No system went untouched. Everything was fair game.

Holes were drilled in guide wheels to reduce weight.

Sensors for the motor, a thermocouple to measure temperature, connectors that would allow the team to replace subsystems that were no longer necessary, heat sinks, wires and protectors – the protective frame was both the biggest weight and the most frightening to remove – were all removed or modified.

Once everything that could be taken off was, the team went even further, cutting into the frame and removing small strips of support metal and even drilling holes through the online skate wheels used to guide Otis up the ribbon.

Even the circuit board fell victim to the saw as the team cut into the unused parts of the board, leaving the once smooth-sided circuit board looking like a puzzle piece.

A before and after look at the circuit board. Every gram counts.

By the time Otis was ready for his run at the Level 2 prize, he had dropped a total of 0.7 kg, coming in at his new fighting weight of 4.3 kg.

That may not sound like a lot, but it comes to 16 percent of Otis’s body mass. That would be like a 165-pound man dropping 26.4 pounds overnight.

In the end, the lighter, faster Otis improved his speed as he headed up the ribbon, but a combination of too much laser power early in the race (which blew a power converter) and accidentally dragging the launch platform along doomed the effort to exceed 5 m/s averaged over a climb.

The challenge now for the team is to find a way to get that last 20% of perrformance understood and under control before they head back to Dryden for the Level 2 prize.

How will Otis drop the rest of the weight and pick up his speed? Tough to know, but you can bet Otis will be working out hard on the treadmill to get back into fighting shape.

Cue the Rocky theme! Getting strong now!

Tom Nugent will be giving a presentation about LaserMotive this Sunday, January 10th, to the Seattle chapter of NSS, starting at 7pm. The meeting is held in the Red Barn classroom at the Museum of Flight.

The SunBreak is a local Seattle paper, and last week they had a story (“Jordin Kare on His Laser-Powered Lifestyle, Space Elevators, and the Almighty Joystick” by Michael van Baker) about LaserMotive and Jordin Kare. It sets the tone in the first paragraph:

I often think of Seattle as a small town, but maybe it’s only in a city that I would not have known one of my neighbors on the next block was “freelance rocket scientist” Jordin Kare. He’s been living on Capitol Hill since March 2003, though his first visit to Seattle was back in 1979.

The awesome Doug Uttecht of Northwest Helicopters also gets a mention (Doug is the pilot who did all the great helicopter flying for the competition.

This paragraph highlights why we believe that power beaming is ripe to become a commercial product:

Terrestrial power beaming is just now becoming competitive on both the amount of power delivered and cost, in special instances. A laser power beaming system “delivers” about 20 percent of its electrical intake–about 50 percent of the incoming electricity is converted to light, and about 50 percent of that light is converted by photovoltaic sells back to electricity.

One application that has received a lot of attention is using power beaming to provide power to UAVs. We will talk more in the future about cases where power beaming makes economic sense.

LaserMotive Recap

by Steve Burrows, LaserMotive team member

After three years of hard work nights and weekends, team LaserMotive arrived at Dryden feeling ready to rock and roll.  Every system had been tested, checked, and packed along with backups for every conceivable contingency.  We were ready, we were pumped, we hadn’t had time to catch up on sleep yet.  Having seen only hints of what the other two teams were fielding, we were wary of our worthy competitors, yet confident of our choices.

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As Ted mentioned, we will be interviewed on the Jay Thomas radio show today around 1:40pm PST / 4:40pm EST. I don’t know if it will be available later online or not, but if it is I will post a link.

The machine that the LaserMotive site is hosted on had a major hard drive failure yesterday, taking our entire site down. The website is back up now, and email should be back soon. Thank you for your patience.