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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."
"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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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.
First off, the contest was for a lunar lander not for a vehicle that can go to the moon, another vehicle to orbit the moon, and another vehicle to land on the moon, because that is what it would take.
Do you have idea what the costs involved are in building a rocket capable of lifting a vehicle away from the earth's orbit so it can travel to the moon? According to this article, one of the biggest reasons the Apollo program was cancelled was the cost: It cost $1.2 billion to launch a Saturn V in 1966, with a total allocation for the saturn program of $6.5 billion.
Putting that in perspectve and adjusting for inflation in terms of 2005 dollars, the cost today would be about $205 billion.
Not even Bill Gates has that kind of money.
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