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."

Comments

Re:What?

[drinkypoo]

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?