NASA has $400,000 in prize money riding on a competition to stimulate the innovative concept -- no matter how weird it may seem -- for sending people, spacecraft and robots directly out to Mars and the other planets of the solar system. Read in SF Gate


Meekk Shelef, a computer whiz, is worried: "We have to overcome the giggle factor," she sighs.

Ben Shelef, a mechanical engineer, is worried, too, afraid that skeptics just don't understand the vision behind their endeavor:

They see the day when vehicles carrying cargo and humans will climb 62, 000 miles high into space on a ribbon of carbon thinner than paper, powered by beams of pure light aimed ever upward from Earth.

Fantastic? NASA has $400,000 in prize money riding on a competition to stimulate the innovative concept -- no matter how weird it may seem -- for sending people, spacecraft and robots directly out to Mars and the other planets of the solar system.

The space agency is serious, and the modest money is helping to allay the concerns of the Israeli-born Shelefs, whose nonprofit Spaceward Foundation in Mountain View has been named to manage NASA's first-ever competition open to professional and amateur space fanatics alike.

With budgetary support from Congress, the agency has committed the prize money for the first two contests -- scheduled for this fall -- in a program it calls "Centennial Challenges." Aside from stimulating research for such far-out ideas as a "space elevator," NASA says it is more realistically seeking new materials combining "light weight and incredible strength" for spacecraft frames, instruments and cables, and new wireless technologies for transmitting power without any cables at all.

The Israel-born Shelefs, who were married to each other but are now divorced, work at a Mountain View aerospace design firm headed by Ben's engineer father, Gad Shelef -- but their heart is in the foundation they have created to popularize new ideas and ventures in space exploration.

"Those new ideas just aren't happening in a big way today," 35-year-old Meekk Shelef, says regretfully, "and we need to stimulate new thinking."

"So," her 38-year-old ex-husband, who is the leading partner of their joint project, adds, "you can't shy away from what looks like the weird or the bizarre if there's realism behind any idea."

According to Brant Sponberg, NASA's program manager for the competition, the agency hopes eventually to offer millions of dollars in even larger competitions to attract imaginative aerospace companies toward meeting many unfilled space needs.

Among them, Sponberg cites: advanced life support systems for astronauts on months-long planetary missions; long-lasting, unmanned instrumented balloons to explore inaccessible Martian features like the canyons of Valles Marineris, nearly 4 miles deep and 1,500 miles long; and "autonomous" drilling rigs to sample planetary features like the icy crust of Europa, Jupiter's most intriguing moon.

"We want to push the boundaries of space exploration as far as possible," Sponberg says.

The two competitions that the Shelefs' Spaceward Foundation is managing for NASA are obviously a modest beginning, but the program is inspired by the $10 million Ansari X prize that was won last year by the successful flight into space by the rocket plane SpaceShipOne and its designer, Burt Rutan.

Already, Ben Shelef said, the first two contests in the Centennial Challenge program have attracted more than 30 entries from industry, universities and hobbyists.

The Tether Challenge calls for entrants to design and create tough, lightweight materials whose strength will be tested by opposing teams in a kind of tug-of-war competition. Rather than dreaming up a shaft for a space elevator, the Tether Challenge is intended to encourage entirely new concepts in materials science, the Shelefs say. The Climber Challenge requires teams to develop robotic "climbers" that lift the heaviest possible load, at a minimum speed of 3 feet per second, to the top of a 200-foot "vertical racetrack" made of metallic ribbon. Climbers, the Shelefs say, might well become the first prototypes leading toward the ultimate elevator.

But 200 feet is a far cry from 62,000 miles -- which is the ultimate goal of enthusiasts seriously trying to develop the Space Elevator -- but seemed a more practical distance for the competition. One of those firms is a Dallas-based start-up called Carbon Designs, Inc., headed by Bradley C. Edwards, a former Los Alamos physicist and author of a book titled "The Space Elevator: a Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System."

Bradley is also on the board of the Shelefs' foundation and his elevator concept would eventually have "climbers" ride upward on a ribbon made of new materials called carbon nanotubes.

Nanotubes are linked atoms of carbon in a unique molecular form shaped like volleyballs. Scientists call them buckyballs or fullerenes -- after Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes.

With a diameter 10,000 times smaller than a human hair, they are still largely the stuff of laboratory experiments. Tiny versions -- in lengths measured in thousandths of a meter -- are already being produced, their electrical properties having attracted the interest of companies as small as Bradley's new firm and as large as IBM.

In the near future, Bradley believes, they can be developed on a large scale into solid, lightweight materials 10 times stronger than steel and ideal for such prosaic uses as golf clubs, tennis rackets and bicycle frames.

"We've still got a lot of engineering to do," he concedes, "but I believe the material will be ready for real use in space within the next few years.''

For the space elevator concept, a single ribbon of nanotubes -- perhaps 3 feet wide and barely thicker than Saran wrap -- would be anchored aboard a huge oceangoing ship, unrolled from spools, and taken aloft by rocket into geosynchronous orbit, 22,230 miles high, the realm where communication satellites now fly.

Robot "climber" vehicles, powered by laser-like beams of light that relay electricity from solar panels aboard the mother ship, would move up the ribbon, carrying fresh spools of nanotube ribbon up to the top. From there, smaller rockets would carry still more lengths of ribbon to a final point 62,000 miles up. At that point a massive counterweight would hold the entire ribbon in place as the earth's swift rotation keeps it taut -- much the way a rock at the end of a string stays taut when a kid whirls it around and around. The elevator could be used by relays of "climbers" carrying entire spacecraft and supplies -- even with astronauts aboard -- that would hurtle into space, on to the moon, Mars or wherever, when they reached the top of the ribbon. To Edwards, the NASA Challenge competitions for the best tether and the best "climber" systems are a prototype for his long dreamed-of space elevator.

As for the ultimate Real Thing?

"It will be built, that I know," Edwards says. "NASA argues it would take 30 years. I say it could be in operation in 15 years -- given the funding. And the cost? I'd say $10 billion, and that's a lot less than the whole Space Station."

For the Shelefs, the first big test of a space elevator's potential elements will come on the weekend of Sept. 30, when their three-day NASA Challenge competition begins in Mountain View at a site still being selected. The foundation is still accepting competitors, they said, at www.elevator2010.org/site/competitionClimber2005.html