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No Winner In NASA's Moon-Dirt Digging Competition
Engadget is reporting that NASA's recent moon-dirt digging competition has concluded without a winner being named. "The excavator built by Technology Ranch was able to notch first place by relocating just over 143-pounds in 30 minutes, but fell quite short on picking up any award monies. So for those of you who weren't exactly ready to go mano-a-mano with these guys and gals this time around, next year you've all got $750,000 on the line."
If not for the participants.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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It should be noted that this is the sixth of seven Centennial Challenges to go unawarded since 2005 by NASA. They have strict contests because they actually intend to implement the winner's idea. 150 kgs on 30 Watts? Good luck, nobody should be ashamed not to hit that mark!
My work here is dung.
it looks like the quarter-million dollars in prize money will indeed be rolled over to next year.
Just like the lottery. Think of all the entries as the prize money goes up.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I can move with 3 pounds of dynamite....or c-4 if you want something actually --stable-- you weenies. Explosives have worked well at moving dirt for a good while.
Oh, sorry, you wanted it moved from here to there, not just "moved."
...build an "mechanic yellow press journalist"[MYPJ](tm). they are used to muckrake all day long. so they'd easily perform the task.
If you could stop at your local day-worker site with some space suits, I bet those fuckers could move some moon dirt in wholesale fashion. We're talking 1000 kilos in 30 minutes, for $50 a head. Saves you lots of money in R&D and I guarantee you can fit 40 of them in one capsule.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Does this officially mean we have a device to move planets?
Just use the nitroglycerin. Get a bigger bang for the ounce.
The entrants all made the mistake of constructing the means to move dirt in Earth's three puny dimensions.
On the moon, they have five.
Thousand.
Yes, five thousand. Don't question it.
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It looks like Slashdot's resident armchair engineers made a pretty good call. That's what the top entrant used.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
If we were highly motivated we could go back sooner than you think - unless you're one of those "the moon landings were faked" bozos. Then "we" doesn't include you. Because when they can identify them before they plan the kidnapping, they don't allow psychotics to join the space program.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It seems odd NASA would need to move so much in such a short time. Although I have no problem with there being no winners in a competition where the guidelines are set, however, once on the moon, I would imagine time is not of a great significance. The cost of getting there is far more important than the cost of the time it take to move dirt. I would be more interested in who could build the lightest machine to move rock.
Then again, as I think about it, 140 lbs is not a whole lot of rock. Doing some quick calculations if might take several months to excavate a useful cavern at that rate. Hrmm... *goes back to his calculations*
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Congress, more funding please..."
This came up on the other posting and if you go back to the .pdf on it (check the original story), you will see that it is 30 watts. Pretty wicked.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Now everyone please bow your heads and pretend to be serious.
The Moon Rulez #1!
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
I don't think you're trolling, but if you think that (even given the budget and the will) that we could do it in less than 8 years, I think you're dreaming.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Often times people are only satisfied with mystery, conspiracies and a sense of paranoia that stems from a general mistrust of authority. It's impossible to logically argue with those people that give credence to the conspiracy theories, simply because they base their "logic" on fallacy to begin with.
Back on topic, I am really not surprised by the outcome of this contest. I can't for the life of me find the original link (why the heck do you link to a blog, and not even the contest page?!) but if I recall correctly, the stipulations for successfully completing the challenge we incredibly insane. You had to keep a low weight, had to be able to move immense amounts, and given the reduced gravity of the moon you had to remain stable the entire time... There was even more involved, but I'm really not surprised...
No, we can't get there all that quickly. We can't use the old Apollo system as we have no heavy load rockets and the Shuttle can't lift the payload in one piece (it may not even be able to lift some of the pieces period). I doubt we could even recreate the Saturn V or even Apollo systems right now with less effort than building a new system from scratch. So you'd need a new rocket and a new lander, unless you want to shove some overcomplicated beast into 5+ shuttle loads.
The Russians probably have a better chance at pulling this off but they don't have the money.
I'm glad you don't think I'm trolling, because I don't do that. But I do think that given the budget and the will - both of which are conspicuously absent - we could get to the moon in less than eight years. Besides the general subject of advances in science since the last moon landing, there's also the fact that there's simply many more firms in aerospace today. I think that the only missing ingredient is the will, really, but it's definitely absent.
This does (once again) raise an interesting point, however. I've still never gotten a reasonable answer as to why we don't have all the documentation from all the prior NASA missions. How is it possible for blueprints to go missing? Whose idea was it to not update the blueprints as parts were changed on the vehicles? What is the source of the gross incompetence that has NASA engineers studying NASA designs in museums to find out what we have forgotten? And how quickly can we get a mission together to land them on the sun?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Isn't it "mono-a-mono..." or "one-on-one?" Am I mistaken/not getting a joke?
The rocket scientists dont look after the blueprints. The janitors do.
In some of the more competent places I've worked, the janitorial staff would not touch anything on the floor outside the trash can. If that meant they couldn't vacuum completely, so be it. If you even wanted a box in the hall picked up you had to put an orange TRASH/BASURA sticker on it.
There is no excuse for not having a comprehensive policy for data retention, especially when the taxpayer is footing the bill for those documents.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who needs to move dirt. How about who can dispose of the greatest number of AOL CD's in 30 minutes?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Wouldn't 150 kg be easier to move on the moon than on earth? The gravity on the moon is only 1.6 m/s^2, so it should require significantly less work to move a given mass on the moon.
150 kgs on 30 Watts ... on Earth.
On the Moon should be more than enough. However low gravity on the Moon might make the scooping inefective if not dificult at least. ... why this competition anyway? Surface of the Earth is diferent than that of the Moon. On the Moon it might be more eficient to throw packed regolith in to the container, and use recoil momentum to power the scoop.
Regolith is not the sand and dust only, it contains irregular shaped grains that may vary in size. If the competition is to make the useable prototype digger than NASA might use more coarse simulant.
I guess we need sand worms after all
Blueprints wouldn't do much good, things have changed so much and old parts no longer are produced that it'd take a massive effort to update to modern parts the spaceships. A lot of things simply aren't on blueprints that would matter in such a case. You don't care if part X is there, you care why part X was put there and if part Y can be used instead. More importantly you care about what effects part Y would have. Experience cannot be distilled into writing and NASA's experience in this area has retired or died.
NASA has very little experience now with capsules anymore or large rockets (likely less so than when Apollo was started). On the other hand they do have better tools than before. In the end it likely is faster and cheaper to make the whole thing from almost scratch but that would take many years. And no, I don't trust the same sort of people who ok-ed the space shuttle to make any design more advanced that Apollo in basic principle. The moon doesn't need any more craters.
This would be much easier if rocket scientists properly commented their projects. When I open a panel on my lunar lander module, the first thing I want to see is a Post-It Note that helpfully says:
// ok, I tried all the components in box m56, and this one seems like it fits right.
// it should probably work. If not, the thingy under panel 245 looks
// like it should fit. Either way, it makes the lights blink.
Actually, this isn't even a prototype level device. My understanding of the purpose of the competition was to foster some creative approaches to solving the problem. One common human fault is once we solve one problem and move on to the next, we just take the old solution and modify it a little bit. By getting some sharp thinkers who don't have the established mindset of how to solve these problems looking at them, you stand a pretty fair chance to bring in some ideas you'd never thought of before.
So here they came up with something superficially similar to a challenge they expect to face in the future, and gave a bunch of students a reason to knock their heads together thinking of approaches. If they get something feasible that can be scaled up and mounted as the main feature on a big, mobile lunar digger, the project is a success.
If you think about it, you could come up with a laundry list of differences between this and what NASA will eventually need to go digging holes on the moon, but it's getting the creative gears turning, which is where they need to be at this point.
The taxpayer isn't footing the bill for the documents. The taxpayer is footing the bill for the finished product, of which the documents are a necessary precursor and side effect.
And they do have a comprehensive policy for data retention: retain what you need, for as long as you can afford to, within the limits of the funds you've been given.
The complaint most people seem to have about this policy is that their idea of what is really needed, for how long, and at what cost, is far beyond what the actual rocket scientists think is needed over the same time period (and let's not even talk about the realities of the aerospace R&D budget!).
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Unfortunately, it was the same engineers who had designed and built the Apollo spacecraft that designed the Space Shuttle. Astronautics is still an evolving field, in which the "art" evolves through design iterations. Except that there has not been the support to move on to the next iteration for some time. Add to that the fact that a 30 year old imperfect vehicle is worse than a the same when new... then you have even more problems.
No, the people who designed the original version of the shuttle weren't idiots. The people who ok-ed the final version and forced the inane air force requirements onto it were idiots. There is no next iteration of the space shuttle, it took 30 years to realize that the original small people carrying ship is actually what is needed. Untold billions have been wasted in the Shuttle, every launch costs 5 times more than it should. In some ways we've wasted 30 years worth of time and effort on projects which if ever used again will need to be redone from scratch anyway. Large scale reusable vehicles given current technology and needs (few launches) are simply impractical in all sense of the word. They did try again with the Venture Star for some insane reason, they scrapped it when it became questionable if it could even reach orbit given the state of the technology.
The soviets and now Russians despite having an atrocious safety record (they had capsules reenter upside down, still attached to another piece, had rockets fail on launch, etc.) have a lower death rate with their space vehicles than we do, that's beyond sad.
The trick is to use dark matter engines and move everything, but the dirt...
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" ; # https://pipedot.org/~stderr & http://soylentnews.org/~stderr
Lower in total? Lower per launch? Lower per unit of time? Or not lower at all? From Wikipedia:
If NASA controlled the press, their failure rate would be a lot lower too.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The Soyuz lost only one crew, 30 years ago or so due to a bad valve. Their bodies came down intact but they died of decompression but they simply couldn't close a valve fast enough once they noticed a problem.
Now including a failure that happened 30+ years ago in a much older version of a vehicle to that of a much newer vehicle is beyond arsine. Since the time the shuttle started flying there have been 0 deaths on Soyuz craft. Even if we include it we see that:
There have been 96 Soyuz flights with 1 loss, assuming equal number of crew per flights thats a failure rate of ~1% in both craft and crew (per launch).
The shuttle has gone up 117 times with 2 losses, assuming an equal number of crew per launch that is a failure rate of ~2% in both craft and crew (per launch).
Last I checked the soviet union collapsed somewhat over a decade ago and these accidents aren't trivial to hide. Given the number of near failures that are known about and the implausibility of hiding a full out failure (you know the CIA would notice that all 3 crew of the recently "returned" soviet craft no longer show up anywhere) yes the soviet/russian Soyuz craft has a better track record.
It's take insane amount of incompetence to make it otherwise, the capsule design is simply inherently safer compared to the shuttle (due to it's simpler design, better failure modes, fewer fragile bits, ease of upgrading, etc.). I think they had a rocket explode on the launch pad but the crew survived as the capsule simply ejected from the rocket right before it happened (try doing that with a shuttle). I'm not saying a reusable vehicle can't be safer but simply that current technology does not allow this.
Remember this: The space program and the moon landings were made during the height of the cold war. What were the Apollo rockets but massive interplanetary missiles holding scientific payloads? Everything that could be made top secret probably was. What is currently available about the program falls under: Blantantly obvious, We've got better for less or showing off.
That the sums stated in TFS are wrong?
In the article its stated that the prize this year was 125,000$ and not 250,000$. it is then stated that next years prize will be 375,000$ and not 750,000$.
There have actually been two crew losses by Soyuz: One cosmonaut at Soyuz 1 and three others at Soyuz 11. In the first case the main parachute didn't deploy and in the second case a valve were not closed during the landing. So the failure rate of the Space Shuttle is actually better 2/117 < 2/96. However the Soyuz had no crew loss since 1971, so the early issues have been fixed. It will be quite difficult to make this statement about the Shuttle.
The taxpayer paid the entire operating budget. As such, the taxpayer is footing the bill for the documents. Claiming anything else is disingenuous.
Losing the documentation and therefore the research means that the research was wasted (since we didn't do anything actually useful on the moon while we were there, except bring back some rocks. Whee!)
My point is that there's no point spending money on new research if you're not even preserving the old stuff.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"