Carstene writes "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial summons Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight breakdown Center. The contest uses a scale model of a space dumbwaiter as a race track. applicants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this increase efficiency could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge seductive UAV's in-flight or even a space conveyor in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow on twitter, or or via blog."

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