Winner in Contest Involving Space Elevator

A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space.

The idea of a space elevator — passengers and cargo traveling up and down a 60,000-mile cable — has long been a fixture of science fiction, notably in Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Fountains of Paradise."

A real space elevator is still decades in the future, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with the nonprofit organization Spaceward Foundation, sponsored the contest to encourage development of some of the needed technologies.

"It's a way to get work done in an interesting area that probably wouldn't be done otherwise," said Andrew Petro, manager of NASA's Centennial Challenges program.

The challenges program is sponsoring other contests, too. This month, Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., won $1 million for demonstrating precision flying of a rocket simulating a lunar landing. Another challenge will test designs for improved astronaut gloves.

For the space elevator challenge, three competing teams built prototypes designed to climb a one-kilometer cable held aloft by a helicopter. Each took turns, shining lasers on the ground at photovoltaic cells on the climbing machines to power the electric motors.

On Wednesday, an 11-pound pyramid-shaped contraption built by LaserMotive of Kent, Wash., successfully made the climb in 4 minutes 2 seconds, fast enough to qualify for a $900,000 second-place prize. A second attempt was one second faster.

The LaserMotive team then started hacking off pieces of their machine in hopes of making it lighter and faster. To qualify for the $1.1 million top prize, the climber needed to reach the top of the cable in less than three minutes. On Thursday, the LaserMotive team was able to shave 13 seconds off the climb time, to 3 minutes 48 seconds, with the machine averaging an upward speed of not quite 9 miles per hour.

The final attempts on Friday, however, were stymied after too much laser power was focused on their climber's photovoltaic cells, burning out some of the electronics.

Meanwhile, a team of University of Saskatchewan students was never able to get far off the ground, while a climber built by a team called the Kansas City Space Pirates got most of the way up but never quite reached the destination.

In four years of the power-beaming competition, LaserMotive is the only competitor to qualify for a cash prize.

Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, the company's principals, do not believe that a space elevator will be built any time soon, but they say the technology will find other commercial applications like powering small robotic aircraft. "This is a business for us," Mr. Nugent said. "We're trying to turn this into a commercial endeavor."

Mr. Nugent declined to say how much LaserMotive had spent in competing the past three years, but said, "We will win more than we have spent."

After months of preparations and three days of competition, he said, "a lot of us might celebrate by going to sleep."