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.

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.

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.

LaserMotive has just issued a press release (here’s a PDF; text is below) about the records we set during the course of winning the 2m/s prize in the 2009 Power Beaming competition. We are also posting a technical backgrounder on the results of our entry in the contest. It discusses our system, what went right and wrong, and what our plans for the future are.

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Below is a brief summary of what we accomplished this week. Once we return to Seattle, I’ll have time to write up much more about this awesome competition. As I’ve said before, we have a great team — our people are our greatest asset. So here are the highlights of our competition entry:

• Powered a climber weighing 5.2kg to an altitude of 1km.
• Powered a climber at a speed of 4m/s to an altitude of 1km.
• Produced more than 1 kW of electrical power via power beaming (distance greater than 300 meters).
• Powered a climber with a net load greater than 10kg at a speed over 6m/s.

That last item is our estimate of what happened Friday, when somehow our bottom stop became stuck on the climber, so it was dragged up the cable roughly 100 feet. During that interval, our climber reached speeds of 6m/s. The bottom stop weighs about 0.5kg, but it is also a friction clamp and will not start sliding below ~8kg of load. Its sliding friction is lower. So we were dragging a total load (climber plus bottom stop weight plus bottom stop friction) somewhere above 10kg (maybe much higher) by my estimate. Once we have time to go look at the data, we may have more detailed results to post here. Once the bottom stop came off, our load went way down and we then had too much laser power on the array, causing the power converter board to overheat.

Right now, our team is going to pack our truck+trailer for the drive back to Seattle.

Our power beaming world record that I posted about yesterday has already been broken. Luckily, we were the ones who broke it. During our window today, we made a speed of 4 m/s (there has been no official report of it yet, as far as I know), beating yesterday’s performance by 7%. We’re working tonight to improve things even more, and will try again for 5 m/s during our final window on Friday.

One of the things that has been a huge factor in reducing our performance from what we tested at our shop numerous times is the sand on the dry lakebed at Edwards AFB. It is extremely fine powder, comparable to flour, and it gets everywhere. Parts of our climber look as if they’ve been through a sand blaster, and the damage that has been done has surely reduced our efficiency. After the competition is all done, we will have some photos to post showing just how fearsome the sand can be!

Here’s to hoping that one or two more tricks up our sleeves will be enough to push us past 5 m/s!

Wednesday afternoon, November 4th, the LaserMotive team set a new record in the Power Beaming competition by climbing 900 meters vertically with an average speed of 3.73 m/s (as reported by the Space Elevator Blog), more than doubling the previous record (1.8m/s set by USST in 2007). That performance qualifies us for the $900,000 prize level, and was achieved using less than half the laser power we had available in 2007.

The entire team is exceedingly satisfied that our system performed this well today, and we could not have done it without support from our sponsors and our families. There will be many stories to tell once the competition is over.

The competition continues on Thursday. Other teams may qualify for prize money, and LaserMotive will be aiming to break the 5 m/s prize level. Stay tuned for more news.