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.

(more…)

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.

The 2009 Power Beaming competition is the week of November 2nd-6th. Our truck is on the way, and more of us are flying down today. LaserMotive is up against two other teams. You can follow the goings-on via a few sources:

• LaserMotive twitter feed
• Space Elevator Blog
• Space Elevator Games

We’ll be back in a week. Wish us luck!

LaserMotive did a bit of tweeting today via #LaserMotive on Twitter. Check it out for an idea of how the full 1,300 meter helicopter test went. We were happy with how our tracking system performed. And the helicopter pilot and the entire cable system performed very well. I will see if there are any good photos or videos to post later this week.

There were a number of issues with the first batch of helicopter testing that Spaceward conducted back in July in preparation for the power beaming contest (now tentatively scheduled for mid-October). They wound up switching to a different helicopter company. The new one is based south of Seattle (near Olympia), and was found by Brent from the LaserMotive team.

Saturday was the first test of the helicopter with GPS hovering and with the new method of deploying and anchoring the cable (which I will let Ben talk about on the competition site), but limited to 1,000 feet altitude. We decided to go down to observe, help out, put some miles on our trailer, and maybe do a bit of tracking practice. I’ll post more about the site later, but it was a wonderful location.

Here are some photos from the day. Click to see a larger version.

Overall, we were very impressed with how the pilot handled the cable. Once at the full height, any movement was small and gradual. We’re looking forward to the next set of tests, when they go all the way to 5,000 feet!

A story on CNNMoney.com about the space elevators and the power beaming competition has some great information about LaserMotive and some of our team members.

If you’re coming here from the CNN story, welcome! LaserMotive is commercializing laser power beaming. Our first step towards that goal is to enter and win the NASA-sponsored Power Beaming competition. After that event, we will develop products to bring electrical power wirelessly to areas where running normal wires is either too expensive or physically impractical. We have more details about the company in our corporate backgrounder and our laser power beaming fact sheet has more about this field.

We only have a few photos or videos online for competitive reasons. Once the competition is finished, we will publish much more about our technology. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, please drop us a line!