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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."
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.
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."
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.
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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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.'"
As pointed out in one of the other posts, "mano" is hand.
"Mono" is spanish for monkey. =)
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.
They could have been more successful (participants *and* program) if they had been better organized and provided better information to the competitors about how the competition would be run.
I was working with a team that was going to compete, and as of last August they still hadn't been told the rules, or even what material would be used to simulate lunar soil.