NASA Space Elevator
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Posted by: Hopkins Insider | 
February 16 2010 | 
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Name: Victor Ekanem
Year: Class of 2012
Hometown: Baltimore, MD
Major: Biomedical Engineering
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Hopkins' climber
Last year as an eager freshman, freshly exposed to the world of Hopkins with a semester under my belt, I looked for the coolest project that I could get involved in. Well, I didn’t do too much looking before I found something I liked. The department of Electrical & Computer Engineering was starting a project to help promote collaboration between freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. It was a win-win situation; I got to work on a very innovative project and had the opportunity team up with upperclassman, graduate students, and even professors. My first year at Hopkins isn’t looking too bad at all!
So, the NASA Space Elevator competition is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a competition hosted by NASA in efforts to develop a space elevator. An elevator to space could someday be used to transport needed materials into space, allowing us to avoid the large cost to launch a space
the climber's destination
shuttle. This competition is under the NASA Centennial Challenges as the Power Beaming Competition. The main goal of the competition is to find an effective method of wireless power transmission, since if an elevator does ever reach space, a 300 mile long electrical cable would be far too heavy to be held from space down to earth. Each team builds a robot vehicle that is powered wirelessly from the ground by a mega powerful 8kWatt invisible laser, through high efficiency solar panels, while climbing up a vertical cable in the sky. The competition is repeated every year until a team can claim the grand prize of $2 million by surpassing a certain height and speed requirement. NASA wants a robot that can climb at 5 meters per second up to the top of a cable held 1 km up in the air by a hovering helicopter. No team has claimed the grand prize yet; so we’re very eager to put our climber to the test in the next competition this upcoming summer.
the Hopkins team at work
Although our team consists of about 10 members, we designed and built our robot through subteams. Each subteam is responsible for engineering an essential part of the climber. Our entire team meets at the end of each week to discuss the progress of the project. Each subteam meets individually during the week for actual build time in the lab. I work on the laser beam delivery group that’s responsible for expanding the beam from only a few millimeters in diameter on the ground to several feet in diameter in the air. My duties include performing loads of theoretical calculations, building small scale prototypes, and even some compatibility testing. Working in subteams allows us to better address the needed details for each component, while still promoting collaboration to ensure that we are fulfilling the overall purpose of the project.
Overall, I would have to say that this is the coolest thing (at least I think so) at Hopkins. I work hand-in-hand with some of Hopkins’ coolest professors, collaborate with high profile companies, and get to work with my closest friends. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything!
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