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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."
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.'"
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.'"
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.