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NASA Planning Six More Centennial Challenges
FleaPlus writes "NASA has announced plans for six more Centennial Challenges for space-related technological achievements. The X Prize-inspired competitions will have cash prizes of up to $5 million. The challenges are for an orbital fuel depot, a lunar-capable all-terrain vehicle, a pressure suit, a long-term rechargeable power system, a micro reentry vehicle, and a maneuverable solar sail. NASA is currently requesting feedback comments on its current draft of the contest rules."
I long for a method of joining objects using fabric hook-and-loop fasteners. I'd even settle for some delicious nutrient-rich orange drink. Where are our priorities?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
that orbital fuel depot sounds like a great place for one of those space elevators.
We're having enough trouble convincing ourselves to keep Hubble (a robot currently in orbit) operational.
You kicked out that nitwit, an encouraging step. Now defy Bush's grand plan for the boondoggle of manned Mars exploration and keep doing good science.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
In the grand scheme of things, a 5 million dollar prize doesn't seem like alot of money. With trillion dollar budgets, and billions going to nasa, 5 million is a drop in the bucket.
Maybe it is a better way to utilize government money - but the research might end up being owned by a commercial entity rather than just being merely used by such an entity. Lockheed and Boeing have been workhorses for such research in the past (think about how the Jeep evolved).
Does the future of space research lie with private efforts ?Or is it headed eastwards (or further westwards) towards China ?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I think NASA is pushing the responsibility to this teams, who want to compete here. We could say, that if they are willing to take over why not, but by NASA defining the rules of what has to be done, I think they limit the outcome in a way, that is unhealthy in the long run. If your idea does not fit in there, because you imagine the future of space exploration in a whole other way, you don't fit into the infrastructure provided by them, then you are screwed, and there is only one prize, or two. If you don't win, you invested a lot of efforts, money, manpower, for a cause that based on somebody others idea, that is maybe flawed, because the world goes into a whole other direction. If you win, NASA is happy, because it has technology very inexpensivly. To make these things work would cost a lot more, if NASA does it. So NASA always comes out of this laughing, because somebody else does the work, and they pay only if you are successful. I think that's strange, as a state sponsored institution they should pay for the basic research, what nobody would like to do, because no one sees if it will be ever profitable.
Only $500,000 for a spacesuit?! $5 Million for an Orbital Fuel Depot !? These prices are absurdly low in terms of 2006 dollars and cents. I bet you could easily spend 10 - 20 times that amount researching and developing real functioning hardware.
By creating these lowball prizes, instead of creating new jobs in-house, which are good government jobs, which pay high salaries and have good benefits, NASA wants to outsource its labor. If they hired engineers in this country to work for NASA, they would have to pay healthcare benefits and maternity leave and all those other expensive things that go along with a well-developed modern society with high cost-of-living. I guarantee you that some recipients of this money will just be a front company with an office and a telephone, and all the engineering work will happen in Bangalore or Bejing. No jury duty time off, minimal vacation time, minimal health care costs, minimal sick leave. So much for American ingenuity and innovation... even our OWN GOVERNMENT is selling us out to the lowest bidder.
I say, stop inventing these stupid prizes, and do it they way we've done it in the past: with a FULLY FUNDED Nasa Budget and well-staffed in-house engineering talent. Outsourcing will just result in an empty shell of an agency. "Ooooh we got a nice spacesuit for only $500,000! I wonder how it works... Oops, we don't have any engineers or astronauts on staff who can actually operate it. I guess we'll just have to hire a Chinese astronaut to fly it for us! LOL"
LOL
It's good NASA are simply planning at this time. That is to say, no concrete blueprint is in place. I hope they are also cleaning up and removing junk and incopetent personnel withing their ranks. Remember billions have been wasted before at the hands of inept and incopetent managers at NASA. This should not be allowed to happen again. What about out-sourcing these efforts to more efficient companies?
Hmm. A smaller version of MOOSE would almost do the trick for the reentry one. Would need a bit of avionics though.
(Goes off to look up old General Electric patents)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
What 'Centenial' are we talking about here? NASA wasn't founded util the 1950's so any centennial of NASA is still many decades away.
Shouldnt nasa have a damn clue and expertises, minus the useless managers, to do this
stuff cheaply, why ask private to do for $5m, what nasa with its 9-5 people * 3 oversight
and redtape - for $500million. When there is no profit margin to 'match' to, you dont
care iof it costs 100x
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I think some of these projects are an order of magnatude easier to accomplish. Pressure suit, moon vehicle, rechargable power source (someone should really just send them a pack of duracells and claim the 5 mil)...all of these seem like they would be pretty simple to research, build, and prove here on earth. Orbiting fuel depot? I think the ammount of time, energy, and money involved in making that one work isn't anywhere near the same challenge level. How do you prove that one? You would have to spend an enormous ammount just getting the thing up there to see if it will work, and god help you if you have to make any changes to your design.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Instead of a micro-reentry vehicle that safely sends back chicken eggs, how about a plan for developing an 'Escape Pod?'
If something goes wrong during orbit, take off, or reentry at least this would provide a means to safely get back to earth if your space vehicle is damaged or malfunctioning.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The advancements generated to put men on Mars are not all known to us at this time. Just as we did not know the effects of going to the moon in the 60s.
/. readers that if any other leader had proposed going to Mars and the Moon again it would have been received a whole lot differently. NASA is finally again moving forward, we finally have someone who killed that damn shuttle program. Can you imagine being saddled with that damn system for another 20 years? The rest of the world would have been watching us from up there instead of looking to the stars to find us.
Is it a boondoggle to set hard goals? If man is going to have a presence in space then we need to start the work now. Sure we've been to the moon before but staying there is a whole new ballgame. Orbit? Been there, done that, hell we are practically trapped in it.
Robots to the stars? Sure, but until we start pushing ourselves out there all we are going to have is the naysayers holding us back forever. Get there and then the naysayers can off to their next project.
I suggest to quite a few
Sometimes good science requires setting and then obtaining goals that others find silly or wasteful. Go look in history back at many of the major discoveries. You will find quite a few many labeled as folly until it was done
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Keeping the site from being /.ed?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
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I think the idea that this is in response to budget problems is probably pretty accurate. It honestly probably is a better way to utilize what money they are getting these days. It worked with the X-Prize stuff, so maybe it will work out for them. I just hope this period of the religious policy of "Jesus is coming back to Earth, so we don't need to go anywhere" works its way out of our government soon.
Meanwhile on the far side of creation...
Jesus: "Dad? Where are these people? Shouldn't they be here by now? What happened?"
God: "Trust me son, you don't want to know."
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Leave the egg in the chicken.
Andrew
... now that Google's Summer of Code is over. I hope NASA won't just send me a lousy T-Shirt this time.
Is this to distinguish them from rooster eggs?
Presumably they meant "chicken eggs".
And (based on my 0% success rate in 7th grade) I can advise participants that just suspending the eggs with rubber bands inside a box isn't an effective strategy. You definitely need some kind of gradual braking mechanism during descent (e.g. parachute).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I think a hovercraft would be the best design for the all terrain vehicle competition. The moon is very bumpy, you know, and a hovercraft could, like, hover of it all. And if you made the hover very, very, big you might be able to hover right back into moon orbit - the gravitation pull of the moon being so much less than that on Earth.
Nasa must be very stupid not to have thought of this concept before - duh.
- My hovercraft is full of eals.
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Homer speaking on the phone: Hello, is this President Clinton? Good! I figured if anyone knew where to get some Tang, it'd be you. ...Shut up!
Change your name to Homer Junior! Your friends can call you Hoju
None of these prizes preclude the use of robotics. Who's to say the rover won't be robotically controlled, or that the recharger isn't for a robot, etc.?
We actually have asphalts that last for 20+ years, they're just not currently cost effective enough to put in over some asphalt that lasts 2 years or whatever. It's cheaper to replace it every 2 years than pay for the good stuff.
Also, you'd put a lot of construction workers out of business if you didn't have to replace roads every 2 years.
I think these monetary incentives to innovate are great. Nothing like a little competition to get people thinking creatively and working hard to realize their dreams. It has done wonders for the autonomous vehicle and commercial space shuttle fields, hopefully that will extend to all these other proposed areas.
One other piece of "future tech" I am hoping it will pay off in is the development of the first space elevator. Another organization has set up an X-Prize style competition, one every year until 2010 when I suppose they're hoping to have something viable. Probably a little overly optimistic, but competition brings out the best in people and I think it's great they are harnessing that power for good.
Go check it out: http://www.elevator2010.org/site/index.html They held their first competition last year. You can check out the results and see the pictures in the "Photo Gallery". Hooray for progress!
The money saved would then be able to fully fund these technology developments rather than them being seen as a joke as they are at present. People took notice of the X-Prize because it was a worthwhile goal and the money was *just about* appropriate. These aren't so nobody really takes any notice of announcements any more.
Dont' knock it. I'm sealing the holes in my jousting armour with silicone as we speak. Oh and as for that solar sail thing....thats covered with the solar superman style cape I'm bolting on the back. Orbital refueling? Easy....eat beans for a week before you get in the space suit. Actually that could help with the maneuverability thing too....hmmm....I'm gonna be RICH!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
For 30 Billion dollars after it's build, we could have a moonbase...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Regarding the long term rechargeable power system they are looking for, is that for planetary and lunar exploration or will it be used in a zero-gravity environment. Without the restrictions of gravity perhaps a very efficient flywheel could be used.
It's intended for lunar exploration. From their rules draft:
The Lunar Night Power Source Challenge is designed to promote the development of power systems and technologies that can operate for long periods in a harsh environment. Historically, planetary surface power technologies have relied primarily upon radioisotopes or available solar energy, providing limited options for operating during planetary nights. The specific objective of this Challenge is to develop rechargeable power system technologies that could support a rover during the lunar night and that have other potential space- and Earth-based applications.
By creating these lowball prizes, instead of creating new jobs in-house, which are good government jobs, which pay high salaries and have good benefits, NASA wants to outsource its labor.
Was DARPA "outsourcing its labor" when it ran the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles?
There's also an article on this in New Scientist, which has the following interesting quote:
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http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn
NASA is also looking ahead to future challenges. Sponberg told New Scientist that the programme has already commissioned two studies - one by the X-Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, California, and one by Paragon Space Development Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, both in the US - to look into a possible challenge for the first private human orbital flight.
"These studies have recommended setting a prize for developing a three-person spacecraft at a relatively low cost of $100 to 150 million," Sponberg says. But he adds: "There are funding and safety issues associated with such a prize that we are still working on."
He says the programme will also soon release a request for proposals for studies of a prize for the first private lunar robotics lander.
How can you beat a mountain bike? Seems to meet all the specifications.
From TFA
"Fuel Depot Challenge: Expected to award a $5 million prize to the first team to build, launch and demonstrate a sub-scale facility that could store or produce liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen - used to fuel spacecraft - in Earth orbit. In November 2005, NASA chief Michael Griffin said future space missions would rely on privately built fuel stations for resupply."
Basically this is little more than a satellite with onboard fuel storage / generation.
Without a significant orbital industry, the only way I can think to "produce" liquid hydrogen and oxygen in situ would be to ship water to the satellite and use solar or nuclear power to crack and compress it. Aside from the water delivery the whole thing could easily be done robotically.
Yes, it will probably cost 10-20 mil to develop and put it up there, but certainly not 100 mil.
PS.
From the actual proposed rules, all you have to do is put 20kg of hydrogen and 120 kg of oxygen in LEO for 120 days. 2 weeks before the 120 days ends it must be liquified and stored in seperate tanks at 16 psi.
If you go the easy route and just launch an orbiting fuel tank, you could probably get away with a system massing no more than 300-400 kg. (The Russian Shtill could put that into LEO for approx. $200K)