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Draft Rules for X Prize Lunar Lander Challenge
IZ Reloaded writes "X Prize Foundation is asking the public to comment on the draft rules set for its lunar lander challenge. From Space.com: According to draft rules for the lunar lander contest, competitors will be challenged to build a vehicle capable of launching vertically, travel a distance of 328 to 656 feet (100 to 200 meters) horizontally, and then land at a designated site. A return trip would then occur between 5 minutes and 30 minutes later...Comments are sought by March 1 with initial sign-ups slated for May 15, according to draft rules, though Murphy added that the comment period could be extended to 30 days."
Could this prize be an attempt to stimulate commercial moon landings alongside commercial spaceflight?
#include "forums.h"
int main() {while (bollox) postcount++;}
I for one welcome our lunar masters
Somehow, I think the Mythbusters will crank out an entry with the stuff around the shop...
Dig the X-wing fighter model rocket out of the closet!
Seriously, how does such a short flight establish anything? launch/land/relaunch has been around for quite a bit, no?
Practice/simulations here
-FL
Hail the nearest Kangaroo...
I'm amazed, they consider a launch for 100 to 200 meters will get them to the moon? Who'd a thunk?
(Is this run by a Quantum Computer?)
In case anyone actually wants to comment.
Just friggin get on with it! The time has passed to sit around talking about it. It's been what? 30 years since we last landed on the moon? We need action!
Sorry, I'm bordering on rant status here...
By the summary, it sounds like a Helicopter could win this.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
...I've got the software end covered.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Sounds like they are trying to improve the contest rules the open source way :)
-JSherman
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
"Comments are sought by March 1 with initial sign-ups slated for May 15, according to draft rules, though Murphy added that the comment period could be extended to 30 days."
Murphy always makes things take longer than you planned...
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
I think instead of 5 or 30 minutes after landing it should be 24 hours or so to win. Why would anyone go to the moon and only spend 30 minutes there?
...these rules make me think of one thing: NASCAR.
Now all we need is guys driving 4x4s with gun racks, Confederate Flags, Calvin pissing on a [automotive brand] logo, and an X-Prize stencil on or around the back window.
(seriously, the I think the X-Prize is an incredibly awesome thing... this idea just made me chuckle.)
/greger
So you attach a rope to a missile, fire the missile at the moon, and then pull it back when you're done. What's the problem here?
I just read the rules, and it talks about the contest being held in a "simulated lunar surface". Where are they planning on simulating 1/6G on Earth? Or are they intending that a craft designed for operating on the lunar surface should also be capable of operating on the Earth's surface too?
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
Because launching from the earth is the same? Clearly I'm not a rocket scientist, but with 1/6th the gravity, wouldn't it take far less propulsion to get off the ground on the moon?
.15Gee test field?
Also: traveling horizontally for 100-200m? I'm guessing there are more crosswinds on earth than on the moon. Also, once again, the same thrust that might move you 100m on the moon wouldn't move you 10m on earth. This seems like a ridiculous standard to meet, and it's going to require far more engineering to accomplish than is necessary for lunar travel.
Or am I missing some large part of the puzzle here, like their
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Linux is STILL for fags.
..shouldn't we be designing a Martian Lander instead?
Why are we even going back to the Moon anyways? By the time we get there China will have claimed it as part of their 'Democracy' anyways...
Sounds like this is the competition armadillo aerospace is supposed to win.
Mine is going to have a spoiler and spinner hub caps too! And wicked flames!
The draft of the rules mention that you need to use rocket power, and not some kind of aerodynamic lift, but that's it. I think they should specify a more realistic conditions of the moon. Obviously you can't have it fly in a vacuum, but you could expose the craft to a vacuum before the flight to make sure it can survive a vacuum. You could do the same thing with the temperature extremes. At the very least a craft shouldn't be able to rely upon earth based navigation aids, like GPS, the suns position in the sky, or even the earths magnetic field.
AccountKiller
Very tricky, indeed. This is harder than it appears at first glance. Anyone can set off a time release bomb that blows it's wad, propelling a ballistic projectile into the air, but it is a bit harder to either: [ (1) stage a series of rockets to create equilibrium with gravity or (2) use a single rocket with a controllable thrust. ] But then you have the problem of attitude adjustment (keeping the rocket's business end pointed at the ground without wind resistance/fins keeping the mechanism pointing straight) and horizontal movement, also while keeping attitude adjustment in check. On top of that, add 25Kg of mass. Not an easy trick at all.
Wonder if they have to include a module to avoid the worms when they approach, so the spice will be safe...
Moon dust expands conciousnes
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Ho me/News?news_id=272
If they put their mind to it they should be able to fullful this challenge in a number of weeks.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Now all that time I wasted playing Lunar Lander in high school might just pay off!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
its not about the travel, its about the controls. It is strictly a controls problem. And on that level, it *is* a challenge.
To make the specifications specific enough that you get something useful but not so specific you don't allow for unique thought.
Why don't they just make the prize for actually getting to the moon? The original X-Prize wasn't won for years, so why make the next one easy? If they really wanted to incorporate their signature do it twice in a row method, they could maybe have the people launch into space, come back, and then go to the moon. That would be cool.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Vertical takeoff is highly inefficient, why does it "have" to be vertical takeoff, why not horizontal like a plane? make use of air's capacity to lift, and the fact that it's easier to move forward than straight up against gravity.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Isnt that what they do?
You have to make it back.
...
...
Otherwise, it's kind of pointless, don't you think?
Second rule is, nobody talks about Lunar Landing Contests!
Dang, guess I can't compete. Good thing Paul Allen can take my place with his super secret company on the Seattle waterfront that noone knows is designing and building spacecraft and that you can see with Google Earth
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It just amazes me to see that they still deal with these stupid imperial units. Remember when Lockheed Martin's engineers caused the loss of a NASA Mars probe because Lockheed Martin still has not adapted the metric system, which 95% of the world use, including NASA? Or take the Spaceshipone mission. At first nobody knew whether they reached the goal of 100km altitude, because the Spaceshipone team used another imperial unit, the mile? The problem was that people use a ratio of 1.6 km/mile. The actual factor is 1.61. The whole world is laughing about this. One unit per physical quantity, only factors of 10 - that's it. Please, adapt. My grandmother mastered this little step for mankind.
That would solve a lot of problems, and make it really easy to beat out all the other competition, IMHO.
....
And, also, is it ok if my Lunar Lander mates with another Lunar Lander and forms a vastly improved Lunar Lander, like in those anime shows like Vandread? And, if that's ok, can they make sure the other pilots are like the pilots on that show? Well, except for the being a prisoner part
Me, I'm waiting for the teleporter to be built.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'll say.. oh wait..
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
How about each entry has to make a flight sim that runs on a Atari 2600. Luner Lander - X-prize edition!
its all based on timing differences between the satalites,
the reciever has no idea at all which way its pointing, and it doesnt care.
It cannot measure angle between the satalites, only relative distance
Seemed to work just fine. Why not copy that?
In a world where the only ocean going supertankers are government owned and nearing retirement. The X-Prise inspired an industry focused on making river boats into producing a sea going yacht.
Granted they may not be ready to cross the ocean or carry cargo, and the technology may never be adaptable to these tasks, but at least the industry has new horizons!
No, in a world where private companies own large numbers of oceangoing vessels. First off, private companies designed and built most launch vehicles in the world, just with government funding. Often they manage the launches and stand to profit/lose from each launch, and thus actively promote their vehicles just as though they hadn't had help in building it. Other companies are more independent. Orbital builds and runs the Pegasus, their own rocket. So does SeaLaunch with the Zenit. SpaceX will soon be joining them with the Falcon series, which further has less components derrived from earlier government-funded (but privately developed) launch vehicles. So, no, your analogy is wrong.
:) ), while all of these other private companies are cruising the ocean in their *actual* oceangoing vessels.
The X-prize supported the development of motorboats made only of designs and materials that cannot be used in oceangoing vessels (the analogy is getting stretched here
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
None of the points that you mentioned are relevant to 'inspiration' or the point of the post that you replied to.
The GP never said that Space Ship One was going to 'evolve' into something more, or even that it demonstrated useful technology, just that it might spur someone's imagination. And if that wasn't clear enough he even went so far as to say that SSO would never see orbit. You even used the word 'inspire' in your post, which was the whole point of the original post, but evidently you don't understand what it means. How do you know that it hasn't already inspired some kid who will grow up to build his or her generation's space launch system?
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
After a series of successful DC-X tests the idiots then in charge at NASA picked the unproven VentureStar design instead, and it turned out that even NASA couldn't afford to buy enough unobtanium to build a working VentureStar.
(The DC-X was destroyed by human error in a test, but the vehicle performed well in all the prior tests. There was no good reason not to pursue the Delta Clipper design, other than that apparently the team didn't give NASA bigwigs enough kickbacks.)
Hmmm... maybe the folks at Armadillo Aerospace can win this one, now that they've completed their new vehicle. Check out the photos, from a distance it looks like something on the cover of a 1940s science fiction magazine. :-)
You missed the point of this competition. The delta-V requirement for the X-Prize mission? The same delta-V reqirement for a lunar landing mission.
.49 to .99 furlongs
3.24E-15 to 6.48E-15 parsecs
7407 to 14815 M&Ms (13.5mm nominal diameter, plain)
When a spec utilizes metric units there really is no need to convert from otherwise nice round, sensible figures like 100 and 200 to 328 and 656. While it is true that I, like most US citizens, default to thinking in terms of yards and feet, we're not (contrary to what is often asserted) incapable of coping with the occasional meter.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I accept you point that the are a lot of commercial vehicles that leave SpaceShipOne in the dust, however that doesn't mean is was not worth while and important.
A better analogy might be computing:
Government funded programs created the first computers and established IBM and the seven dwarfs who went on to become a commercial success.
When the early Commodors and Ataris came out they were useless when compared to the mainframes of the day, and were often dismissed as gimmicks or toys. This seems to be very much where SpaceShipOne fits in.
We may have to wait for Boeing to react (as IBM did) before we have a useful and cheep commercial space ship. But SpaceShipOne may herald an entirely new market for the space industry.
(or it might not, but $10m wouldn't buy you one ship's peanut in that industry so what was lost?)
1. Yes, it would take far less propulsion on the moon. Then again, you can use a much lighter prototype on Earth, so it should more or less even out. Besides, there's really nowhere else to go, so we'll have to make do with this planet for now.
2. You should find some time and place where there isn't much crosswind for the test. There are plenty of such places, including indoors.
3. Air resistance is pretty negligeble at small speeds, so I don't think the lateral movement part changes much. And gravity doesn't play into that part at all.
So I think these look like as good a set of criteria that you can get without actually testing on the mooon.
SpaceDev, a company which builds microsatellites and propulsion systems (including the rockets on SpaceShipOne) has a neat 3D lunar lander simulator (binary link) on their website. It's kind of neat to play to get an idea of the control side of the problem.
Well... once they get their new engines under control, which from the last update looks like it should be soon, they should be able to do this already: they've already done the vertical liftoff/hover/landing, and they have done countless controlled hovers while driving it around with a joystick. Piloting it up, over, and down shouldn't be much more difficult.
btw, the movie of the liftoff/hover/landing (well, the landing was botched from a single foot landing first with a high cross wind and the engines still on and trying to re-level the ship...but anyway):
armadilloaerospace.com
armadilloaerospace.com
And of course, go to the main page and read more news on what they are doing.
tm
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It doesn't mention this in the article submission, but it should be noted that this $2 million prize is an Alliance Challenge in NASA's Centennial Challenges program. Basically, NASA provides the prize money if there's a winning vehicle, while the X Prize Foundation is responsible for actually organizing the event. NASA has stated that they'd like to offer larger-scale competitions and prizes in the future, but they're trying out these smaller ones first.
Also, there's already a couple of groups which look like they'll have a decent chance of winning the lunar lander competition, including John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace (Carmack is the co-founder and lead programmer for id Software). Here's a quote from an article about last year's X Prize Cup Expo, where the ideas for a lunar lander challenge were first being discussed:
John Carmack, who makes his money as a video-game developer and spends some of it as the leader of Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, said the lunar-lander challenge "certainly sounds like something up our alley." Armadillo is developing a vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket capable of bringing passengers to the edge of outer space.
California-based Masten Space Systems is also working on a vertical-launch craft, and Michael Mealling, vice president of business development, said Masten was interested in both challenges. "It just so happens that the flight plan [for the competitions] matches our development cycle exactly," he told MSNBC.com.
Why not just ask the Chinese how they are going to do it? We will spend the next few billion dollars and years in meetings drafting proposals. Return to the moon? HA! that would take commitment and resolve my country doesn't seem to possess anymore. Besides the winning effort to this contest will probably end up in court fighting patent infringement cases well into the next century.
Why is this article in the "science" category? We are talking about an engineering task, are we not? /. article refer to a 3rd class space.com article? All information is available in the X Prize announcement.
And why does the
competitors will be challenged to build a vehicle capable of launching vertically, travel a distance of 328 to 656 feet (100 to 200 meters) horizontally, and then land at a designated site. A return trip would then occur between 5 minutes and 30 minutes later
I already got just such a vehicle in mind. It is what some call a "helicopter"
you don't actually have to land on the moon?
After all, the first landing was staged in Nevada. Might as well repeat that phenomenal success!
Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick any two. - RFC 1925
The contestant whos' sponsor has the deepest pockets will win (just like the last silly X prize). The real innovation came from those who used ingenious methods to overcome financial restraints and still have a competitor. The slackers just took a gob of cash and bought an expensive model of this, attached it to a current expensive model of that (nothing innovative about the products), and bang! you get a winner. I wonder if anyone will bite again this time.
This whole thing sounds like a handout to the folks over at Armadillo Aerospace. They've been doing vertical takeoff, hover, and landing for some time. All they'll need to do is increase their altitude and throw in a command for lateral movement (I think their control system can already do this if they tell it to). So for this one team it's a mater of refining their existing design a bit and just doing it. For everyone else it may be more work.
It is equvalent; consider the following:
- Earth: higer gravity, shorter burn.
- Moon: lower gravity, longer burn.
Delta-V is Delta-V is Delta-V, doesn't matter if I am on Earth or the Moon or freakin Phobos for that matter. All it is, is a change in velocity. It has nothing to do with ANY local parameter.