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X-Prize Lunar Lander Competition a Go
Tiger4 writes "The X-Prize foundation and NASA have signed off on a $2.5 million prize for proof of concept lunar lander vehicles. From the article, 'NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale told MSNBC.com that the point of the competition was to "take advantage of new innovative technologies that have been developed" since the last lunar landing, during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972." There are two levels of competition, "In the Level 1 competition, the vehicles must be in the air for at least 90 seconds during each leg of the round trip, and land on a flat, even surface. The Level 2 competition is harder -- requiring 180 seconds of flight each way, with a rocky, lunar-style landing site.' NASA and X-Prize people are still working on the final rules, but they are already signing up teams and expect to see vehicles in time for the X-Prize exhibition in New Mexico, October 18-21, 2006."
Is there a reason to have consolation prizes for second and third place? I wouldn't mind "cost-recovery" of up to $xxx for non-winners, but to actually award them a prize? There is no room for "good enough" in Space.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
This is probably a good way to gain technology while minimizing cost. How much would it cost for NASA to do this in house? 100 million? 200 million? Too expensive? Here's the solution. Offer college students 2.5 million as a prize for a "competition". Good work guys.
Ok, dumb joke. But, it's like the X Prize Organization is escalating it's spnsorship to new heights. I find this quite encouraging. What a way to push science and engineering. This really tickles my libertarian bone - no government involvement.
Oops, I forgot! There's some real libertarian haters here on /.. I guess because they confuse Libertarians with conservative Republicans?
NOTE: Using a lowercase 'l' when describing my Libertarian tendancies was to hint that I haven't quite drank their Kool-Aid (TM).
Talk about cost-effective NASA spending...
I wonder if we'll see an increase in "bounty" based development. It certainly seems likely. A large number of smaller F/OSS projects also offer a significant monetary prize or "bounty" for someone who can implement tech to solve a specified need, want or problem. The Google Summer of Code is also, in my mind, a similar deal.
This stands in contrast to older, beaurocratic methods that are closed and contract-based.
This new openness is, in my opinion, closer to the ideals of a free market than the latter mentioned system.
Can I win the contest using my parachute-based landing system?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I would like to see a competition calling for teams to send vehicles to the REAL moon, just like the Ansari X-Prize winners had to actually go into space.
It's called the McDonnell Douglas DC-X.
You would think NASA could come up with a more wasteful way to waste money...
Caution: Contents under pressure
"Fall heavy towards the moon, and the moon falls also towards you." -- Nietzsche
Hammer and feather are dropped simultaneously from equal heights (as measured by distance from the center of the moon), separated laterally by a distance substantially less than the moon's diameter. Both hammer and feather experience force from the moon's gravity proportional to their mass, and hence both accelerate at the same rate. Meanwhile, the moon is also accelerating towards the other two objects, but unevenly so: the hammer exerts a greater gravitational pull due to its greater mass. The moon is therefore subject to a torque, causing it to accelerate more rapidly towards the hammer.
The hammer is first to hit the ground.
Anyone who denies this truth is a spatially absolutist lunocentric whose refusal to recognize the validity of hammer mechanics/experience places him wholly beyond the help of Galilean metaphysics. Such hammer (feather) rejectionists ought to be banished to the stars, for their own good and for the good of not only hammers and feathers but all subjugated smaller objects, everywhere, who find themselves victims of this scientifically perpetrated emassculation.
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a756f345ec354225c08ff1a10a43162a
Armadillo Aero has this one nailed. http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/
A couple of the top contenders, who have been working on this type of vehicle even before the prize was announced are: Masten Space Systems and John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
Obligatory images from the first prototype.
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There's no rule against reusing old technology like the Apollo Guidance Computer? Or building a low-tech Salvage 1 is there? Granted it's not sexy but it should work. :P
Wouldn't the thrust systems need to be significantly different for a 180 second hop on earth when compared to the moon? Not to mention weight of fuel and what not...
It was funny the first few times.
I have nothing to say.
$2.5M is NOTHING to them. Nothing.
I hate to play this card, but by the end of 2006, we will have spent a (conservative) estimate of $315 billion in Iraq.
Heck, compare this to non-government entities. If ol' Bill could get college students to write him a completely new OS for 2.5M, he'd probably jump at the chance.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Does the 90 seconds in the air have to be before it blows up^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H possibly experiences capsule divergence issues?
$350,000.00 for first flight? I don't think so. A decent aerospace engineer must cost a business around 120 grand or so for a year of work, and then there are all the materials, construction, infrastructure.
This sounds more like a bonus add-on to the existing x-prize than the "new prize" it's being touted as. Or maybe it's another cookie to try and get a guy like Paul Allen to dump far more into it then he'll ever get back...except it is a nice thing for him to do...give back.
Don't get me wrong...I'm all for moving the pork away the government and back to the citizenry...my quibble is with the portrayal.
If I'm right, this has a stink to it...media hype. Just be honest about what it is...a little extra cash to the current X-prize competitors to move in a different direction for awhile.
it would be great to see one or more small, agile aerospace companies emerge from this. The entrenched players (raytheon, lockmart, boeing) are pretty fucking pork laden, massive management overhead, shareholder burdens, lobbying payola. Not bin laden, pork laden.
No it wasn't.
How hard would it be to deploy a tether on the moon and be able to pick up and move a lander? The gravity on the moon is obviously less, so the strength requirements of the rope would be significantly less. I wonder if its possible to use a hemp rope suspended from a satellite to move things on the moon.
You know, it's vaugely surprising that they're even testing modules. Back in the day, when they were doing this the first time around, the lunar lander set down on the moon without ever being tested. They were depending on the relatively low gravity on the moon, and thus the lander could not actually stand up under it's own weight on Earth. So they couldn't test it under Earth gravity, and so they didn't test it at all.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Uh, why would the moon feel a torque from a falling object?
I had a professor that made this mistake once..
draw a circle on the board. it is the earth. draw a bunch of arrows pointing down. that is the gravitational force vector.
did you draw them down towards the ground or down towards the center of the circle you've declared is the earth? my prof did the former...
Actually, they're proofs of concept, which means the contenders don't have to develop a vehicle to deliver the landers to the moon... they can simulate the lunar landing on earth. That makes the prize a lot more attainable for a private startup venture than requiring them also to build up a lunar capable launch infrastructure.
As such, Armadillo would actually be an excellent contender for this prize, considering their current design is a really souped up lander in the first place.
If we were talking about the moon's gravitational field you'd be right. But OP was talking about the combined gravitational field of the hammer and the feather. This is torque, no?
The hammer is first to hit the ground.
That may be, but the time difference between the hammer hitting the ground and the feather hitting the ground probably won't be observable to us....
Who said it was supposed to be funny? My intent is to provoke discussion on the failings of our contemporary post-post-modern sort of "education" that sneers at any hint of relativism, even in physics. It's obvious from your tone that you were one of those who were taught, wrongly, that hammer and feather hit the ground together. You of all people could stand to open your mind a little bit.
You are an educated singularity idiot who
can stupidily deny Nature's Harmonic 4
simultaneous 24 hour days within a single
rotation of Earth, or even make parody of
the Cubic Creation Principle - but your
mental ability to comprehend the greatest
social and scientific discovery of all human
existence has been lobotomized by the evil
academic singularity bastards hired to
destroy your ability to think opposite.
Educators teach assumed math, but are too
damn dumb, stupid and evil to know that
until Word is cornered, Math is fictitious.
http://timecube.com/
Not to troll, but you totally sound like the Time Cube Guy...
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
The difference between the masses of the hammer, feather, and moon are so vast that the time difference may not be observable to the universe.
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers.
Check this out:
c h_Vehicle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Resear
There was a jet engine that lifts 5/6 of the weight, leaving lunar-like gravity effects (though not inertial effects) for the rocket engines to deal with.
There's a story in "Chariots for Apollo" about the potential problem of hitting the descent stage engine bell on a uncharted rock. They had to consider that landing on a rock could damage the bell, push the bell into the ascent stage, etc... But they had neither the time nor the money to design and execute a test + spare LM to see what would happen. One day as they were moving the LM on a crane, the rig slipped, and the whole thing landed, engine bell down, on a pile of crates. No significant damage. One of the managers turned to the team and said someting like "You just got your million dollar test for free."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/feather.avi
in the last frame you can clearly see there is enough room between the feather and the ground to insert your brain!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's the principle of the thing. How many times have you heard the lie told that the hammer and feather fall together? How many times have you heard Newton's name invoked in promoting this egregiously lunocentric viewpoint? It's about time someone took a stand for hammer (feather) mechanics. The truth is that according to Newton's law of universal gravitation, the hammer and the feather fall to the ground at different rates.
The truth is that according to Newton's law of universal gravitation, the hammer and the feather fall to the ground at different rates.
the truth is that newtons laws are just approximations of reality that happen to give good enough results in most situations.
just how many significant figures are newtons "laws" known to be correct to in situations like that? i bet its nowhere near enough to answer the question of which will hit first.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yes, but it is within Newton's theoretical framework that the absolutist lie is promuglated, printed glossy and rude for unquestioning acceptance despite this glaring internal inconsistency. Even within this framework, the statement that both objects hit the ground together is false.
the truth is that newtons laws are just approximations of reality that happen to give good enough results in most situations.
The truth is that everything in human perception is just an appoximation that gives us good enough results in most situations. Not just our formally described scientific notations, but realy basic things -- like the pixels you're reading now, the shape of the monitor that your eyes and brain put together, and the buzz of whatever sound is in the room now.
(sorry, but people who piss on Newton are a pet peeve of mine. He wasn't wrong, he just didn't have any way to account for the forces that derive from the fabric of reality.)
Am I the only one who sort of wants them to say, "Hey! Anyone who goes and builds a moon colony gets all our money."
Enough with this baby-step stuff.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
That's bullshit, Newton was wrong. This isn't some personal failing of his, just like it wouldn't be a personal failing of Aristotle to not know that the sun was powered by fusion--as you say, the information to be more correct was not available to him.
Nevertheless, doing the best you can with what you have does not prevent you from being wrong, which is what he was.
I'm just waiting for Bert Rutan to come back with a new and improved Space Ship One. The guy is amazing, his original desigh, which won the X-prize originally, already fits most requirements. I hope to see more from him in this next round.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I'm gonna go build my own lunar lander! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack! Ahh, screw the whole thing.
You're probably correct, and the grandparent poster is clearly either having fun or is a total nutcase. However i think it's an important distinction to make. The whole "all objects fall at the same speed no matter their mass" thing always bothered me. My physics teacher stated that was the case but it didn't make intuitive sense to me. I understood that feathers fall a hell of a lot faster without air resistance but it seemed to me that if you dropped the moon on the earth (ie instantly killed its orbital rotation) that it ought to fall quite a bit faster. It took me longer than it should have to realize that although the mass of the moon would be canceled out just like for the feather or the hammer, that would be completly ignoring the other side of the equation in which the earth would fall towards the moon much faster than towards the feather or hammer.
Really everything we know is a series of aproximations approaching the truth. Telling people a simpler "mostly true" version that covers their needs at the moment is fine, as long as you're willing to go on to the more complicated explanations as the need arises. All physics teachers/professors should be ready to explain the difference in the gravitational pull of objects on the earth if any students have trouble believing the first explanation (or that explanation should be offered by default, which is the better idea in my opinion.)
Understanding that the difference in the "falling" rate was the difference between the gravitation pull of the feather and the gravitational pull of the hammer actually made the original statement make a lot more sense to me because i could see how one might technically fall faster than the other while practically the difference was irrelevant.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
... they are doing it for the love. People competing for the prize are doing this because they can do it and because they want to do it. The prize is a consolation prize and yes helps recoup costs but that is about it. The original X-prize was $10M and Burt Rutan got $20M from Paul Allen in funding on top of materials he already had. Its a token prize to get people going, not meant to be a business decision. Doing it for love, not profit. The way the competition is set up there are already 2 serious contendors, Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace. They can modify existing hardware to compete without much difficulty.
If I created the X-Prize, I would want several winners. Each of those projects will have something to contribute to the end product designed by NASA for an auctual Lunar trip. One may have a revolutionary liftoff thruster, while it may suck at landing while another might land extremely smoothly, but take off poorly. If you only accept one winner then your possibilities are limited while three has many more possibilities.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Anyone who denies this truth is a spatially absolutist lunocentric whose refusal to recognize the validity of hammer mechanics/experience places him wholly beyond the help of Galilean metaphysics.
You are right for all the wrong reasons. See, to a hammer, everything is a nail. The other objects are much less motivated to hit their target. Be the hammer.
the guy may be nuts but he is right about one thing --
"until Word is cornered, Math is fictitious."
the best description of the move from turing machine architectures that we're currently on to an NN-based architecture that i've ever seen. until we understand how language and NN based frameworks relate to turing architectures, we dont really understand ourselves or anything else for that matter.
Telling people a simpler "mostly true" version that covers their needs at the moment is fine, as long as you're willing to go on to the more complicated explanations as the need arises.
Perhaps, but you absolutely ought to explicitly say that you are doing so, and that the version you're telling them isn't applicable in all cases, and what those cases are.
Otherwise you're just spreading ignorance.