Next week three teams will compete in the Mojave area for prize money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge competition. The subsequent week, starting on November 2nd, the Power Beaming Challenge event will get underway at Dryden AFB, also in Mojave.

On Monday and Tuesday (the 2nd and 3rd) there will be setup and testing. The competition will begin on Wednesday, the 4th, and run for three days.

I believe four teams have qualified for the competition: Kansas City Space Pirates, LaserMotive, NSS, and USST

The event was supposed to happen back in July but problems with suspending the 1 km ribbon from a helicopter caused a lengthy delay. They think the bugs are worked out now: Are you sure it’s going to work? - The Space Elevator Games - Oct.23.09

We made major changes, which I’ve covered in previous posts, and went to perform test flights in Olympia, Washington. We’ve flown the 1 km vertical racetrack eight times now (8 successes out of 8 tries), and are pretty confident we’ve got it down. Yet we haven’t done it at Dryden, and perhaps we were only 8-times lucky… I hope not!

The teams are also confident. Their task is more difficult than Spaceward’s. Just like with our vertical racetrack, they went through several design iterations in order to get their power beaming systems ready, and almost by definition, each iteration except possibly the last one ended in “failure”, or in other words – in figuring out something new.

Collectively, they have tested their systems horizontally, vertically, on test-stands and on treadmills. They beamed power to a kilometer, and extracted more than they need to win the 5 m/s prize money. They tracked model cars, people, bicycles, cars, ultra-lights, and even canoes. They simulated real runs. They think they’ve got it down. Yet none of them has climbed 1 km vertically.

So there. One week to go, and there are plenty of reasons to be confident. But are the teams already spending their prize money? I hope not.