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Next NASA Centennial Challenge Competition
Andrew-Unit writes "NASA today announced the next competition in the Centennial Challenge series. A prize of $250,000 USD will be awarded to the team that can autonomously deliver the most lunar regolith to a collection device in 30 minutes. From the press release: 'This challenge continues NASA's efforts to broaden interest in innovative concepts ... We hope to see teams from a broad spectrum of technical areas take part in this competition,'"
We get to see a published set of standards, an open competition, and the winner isn't based on who has taken whom to dinner.
Wow! Making awards based on what one has accomplished rather than who one knows. This could have a major impact on business integrity if it's widely adopted.
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This sounds like one of the US FIRST competitions. Perhaps FIRST should pick up the project and end up giving a small pile of cash to the school that wins it...
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What's not realistic? They have another $250k challenge to see who can extract the most oxygen from the regolith in 8 hours. If you wanted to establish a base, you need something to bring all that regolith to get oxygen from.
I don't think it can be overstated how important automation is to our future.
If we can turn technologies like this into something that: collects, proccesses, and utilizes' raw matireials, and self replicates, the possibilites are limitless. If we can get automation sufficiently advanced we can send a small robotic factory to the moon or mars and have a habitate, fuel, air, water, and bio-mass ready for use when we get there. Terraforming and other "sci-fi" ideas become a little more plausable.
The raw matirals are out there that will allow the human race to expand away from the "one planet, one disaster away from extinction" problem. And the solution isn't people in space it's automatons as an extention of our will.
*checks above post* Whoa! Too much Red Mars today.
The constraint in collecting moon rocks is not time, it's weight. This contest would be much more useful if the time limit were eliminated and replaced by a limit on the combined weight of the system and fuel. Better yet, determine the required amount of moon rock up front, and award the prize to the lightest system that succeeds in gathering that amount.
The footnote doesn't change that these prizes are orders of magnitude too small to even be humored.
But the idea seems rather sound even if the prizes were higher. As Open Source development teaches us, many eyes make for better code, same applies for engineering.
There aren't "many eyes" who have tens of billions of dollars, and the ones who do have that money didn't get it by flitting it away on prizes. Please either reread my post on the subject, or respond to my particular critiques.
the Russians with their old rockets have shown whizzy isn't necessary to get the job done
Don't deceive yourself - Russian rockets are no low-tech contraptions. They're cheaper for a number of reasons - lower labor costs and surplus capacity often playing big roles, but also the long-time use of the same general model (almost any model, used long enough, will become "relatively" cheap). As for the US, our only "expensive" launcher of sizable payloads is the shuttle; the rest of our prices aren't bad (have you looked at a Delta-IV heavy's prices?)
Who knows what some band of geeks in the desert can accomplish
Without a personal fortune, not much. Physics is a harsh mistress, and the simple facts are that even LOX/LH2 exhaust leaves the best-designed engines at a fraction of merely LEO orbital velocity, requiring a huge difference between propellant and craft mass (and beyond that, complex stagings and/or expensive advanced materials), and all you get out of it is a tiny payload fraction. Because of this, orbital craft are monstrous things with a lot of materials and labor costs. It's nice to think that anything can be accomplished if someone wants it enough and works hard enough, but this is a world without fairy elf magic.
Also, I can kill you with my brain.