LaserMotive is proud to introduce a 5 minute video that tells who we are, what power beaming is and what applications we think it can enhance or enable.

Many thanks to Owen Kindig of Ztoryteller for his awesome work in creating this video.

NASA has put their video summarizing the 2009 Centennial Challenges online. Team LaserMotive is featured prominently in the Power Beaming segment.

Below is a continuous video of LaserMotive’s first climb at the 2009 Power Beaming competition. Because it took nearly 4 minutes, the middle 3 minutes is sped up, and accompanied by appropriate music. We incorporated audio recorded by LaserMotive on the lakebed, so that all the different voices can be heard. Thank you to NASA for providing the video footage!

I really should have made and uploaded this video months ago. It was only the tech symposium at NASA that drove me to make it, and now we can share it with you!

Thanks to Ted over at the Space Elevator Blog, we have a link to Fox News coverage of the power beaming competition, including some great quotes from LaserMotive co-founders Jordin Kare and Tom Nugent.

As we mentioned before, helicopter testing for the power beaming competition went very well last weekend. We had a sacrificial dummy climber (dubbed the “Red Shirt array”) that we clamped onto the cable. There were two cheap cameras mounted on it, one pointing up and the other pointing down, to record the flight.

I’ve combined and synced the two videos. “Vomitrocious” is how some people described them individually. See what you think when they’re combined (but be warned, the spinning might make you a bit dizzy)!

While practicing braking at the 2007 SE Games in Utah, we had an incident where our vehicle (built like a tank) was accidentally allowed to free-fall down our treadmill cable from a height of nearly 4 meters. It survived with no issues (see the video if you’d like to relive that moment of terror for us).

Ben Shelef, organizer of the Power Beaming competition, blogged about stress testing going on at the competition site (Dryden Flight Research Center) this week:

It is always difficult to place your project into a stress test – you poured your heart and soul into it, and all you really want to do is protect it and treat it gently so it doesn’t break… Which is of course silly – you should test your brakes in an empty parking lot, not in the middle of traffic.

As part of our preparation for those tests (which are themselves preparation for the actual competition), we’ve been doing a number of tests, including dropping the vehicle (on purpose, this time) down the cable onto our bottom bumper. We were a bit nervous about it before the test, but this test and many others went pretty well:

As you can see, the structure is very robust, despite being engineered to be lighter than our previous entry. The climber vehicle will undergo other testing at the competition site (Dryden) this week to evaluate its mechanical robustness. We don’t know if the Dryden safety personnel will have any concerns, but this video shows that descending the cable shouldn’t be too much of a safety concern, mechanically speaking. We’ll find out this week if anything else is of concern. While some of our team is at Dryden for those tests, the rest of us are preparing for yet more tests of our own here at our shop.

…It Cooks!

There are always more tests one can do when developing a new system, especially one like ours that is so different from what’s been done before. During one recent test, we ran our lasers at high power to evaluate some of our optics, and as usual we dumped the beam into our foamed carbon beam stops. But why let all that energy go to waste, especially when it’s easy to skip meals while working late? So we decided to grill some hot dogs while running the test. Here’s the result:

Yum! And here is a video of the cooking process. Next time we’ll have to throw an IR filter on the camcorder to reduce the brightness of the laser light.

We still have some spare hot dogs in the fridge, so if we need to do another test like this, we’ll probably cook some more. This time, we just need to remember to bring some condiments…

Last year, there were many items which made interesting sounds, and we joked about making a “Sounds of LaserMotive” CD. One of the obstacles to releasing the cool sounds was that we didn’t take the time to record many of them.

Here’s a minor example of an interesting sound this year. The motors in our tracking mirror make an interesting sound as they move, and when the control computer is powered on, it has a short start-up / calibration sequence for the mirror which moves it and makes a few notes.

If we get the time, maybe we’ll program the mirror to play a song…

Our vehicle group recently performed a battery-powered endurance test of our prototype vehicle drive sub-system on our upgraded treadmill to see how it would perform over long distances. We’re not releasing exact details just yet, but suffice it to say that the test exceeded the speed and distance requirements set by the Spaceward Foundation for the full $2 million NASA-sponsored prize for this year’s Power Beaming Challenge. According to the rules of the competition, the winning entry must power a vehicle up (and back down) a steel cable a vertical distance of 1 km at a minimum speed of 5 m/s using only power beamed from a station on the ground. Here’s a video of parts of the test:

As you can see, the drive system is very robust, having run for quite a long time at a high speed. We’re working to improve the drive system by making it lighter and more efficient, but as it stands right now we have a drive system we could use today. It’s an important milestone to have reached because of the entirely different nature of this year’s steel cable from last year’s flat ribbon.

We are, of course, building and testing the other sub-systems as well. A video showing a voltmeter measuring output of a photovoltaic array is probably not nearly as exciting to watch as one of the drive system, but we’ll see what we can post as we get other results.

UPDATE: We have issued a press release about the endurance test.

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!