Courtesy Photo As a member of a team of physicists, engineers and technicians that competed earlier this month in a NASA-sponsored Space Elevator Competition, Alpena native Steve Beland, far right, recently won a share of his team’s $900,000 prize. The team, called LaserMotive, is shown with their successful climber at the competition site in the Mohave Dessert in California.

Alpena native and electrical engineer Steve Beland of Lake Forest Park, Wash., has won a share of a $900,000 prize for successfully competing in a recent high tech Space Elevator Competition. Funded by a NASA program to explore bold technology, the contest is intended to encourage development of the science fiction concept of space elevators as a way to reach space without the risk and expense of rockets. Beland was a part of a LaserMotive team that designed a robot powered by a ground-based laser beam enabling it to climb a long cable dangling from a helicopter. Teams, including ones from Missouri and Alaska, traveled to Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert to compete, a place most familiar to the public as a space-shuttle landing site. The contest required machines to climb 2,953 feet up a cable slung beneath a helicopter hovering nearly a mile hig.