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Google's $30,000,000 Lunar X PRIZE
chroma writes "It's been a long time since anyone has explored the surface of the moon. But now Google has teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation to offer a $30,000,000 bounty to the first privately funded organization to land a robotic rover on the moon. Google, of course, has offered the free Google Moon mapping service for a few years now. Looks like the other search engines have some catching up to do in the space exploration department."
Of course Google wants people to land on the moon, they're desperate to find employees for their lunar campus.
How do I prove I landed a robot on the Moon? Can I just email a link to a YouTube video (that I shot at Capricorn One Studios)?
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make install -not war
The key words here are "privately funded organization". Its not about landing a robot on the moon, its about encouraging non-governmental space exploration
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
At least one ship and/or robot explorer will be named "Alice"
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Could you imagine the kind of air-er, vacuum you'd get off a lunar halfpipe?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay, which would charge the batteries when opened. A polonium-210 radioactive heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the long lunar nights.
During its 322 Earth days of operations, Lunokhod 1 traveled 10.5 km and returned more than 20,000 TV images and 206 high-resolution panoramas. In addition, it performed twenty-five soil analyses with its RIFMA x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and used its penetrometer at 500 different locations.
Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 37 km (23 miles) of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back 86 panoramic images and over 80,000 TV pictures. Many mechanical tests of the surface, laser ranging measurements, and other experiments were completed during this time. With regards to a human lunar base, I think the prize could also have great benefits. I think it's pretty much a given that robots and rovers will play an integral support role of a manned lunar base, and getting robots to operate in a lunar environment is still something we have little experience with. The prize will likely lead to discovering plenty of new ideas and techniques which do and don't work on the lunar surface.
Also, rovers are a great way to captivate people's attention. Just look at how much the Mars rovers has increased people's attention at what's going on with Mars. For my generation, lunar exploration (human or robot) is something that exists only in history books. Seeing the Moon through the eyes of a rover (a rover put up by entrepreneurs, not a government) can change that, and increase support for human exploration of the Moon.
Also, I think this is a great way for the "space == science only" crowd to get interested in private space activity. Thus far, many of them have either been ambivalent about private space, or outright antagonistic about it ("just a way for rich people to waste money"). This prize helps cement the idea that yes, private spaceflight can have benefits for science.
Traditionally, prizes have encouraged people to invest a wide range of resources. Lindbergh was one of few to spend less than the prize amount during the Orteig prize--others, like Admiral Byrd, spent nearly $100,000, or four times the $25,000 prize value. It has been reported that Mojave Aerospace Ventures spent significantly more than the $10 million purse to win the Ansari X PRIZE. Teams are willing to spend more than the prize value, as they get to keep their intellectual property and capitalize on it. In the case of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, we expect some teams to be willing to spend more than the value of the prize. Other teams may be able to complete the mission at or below the value of the Grand Prize purse. I don't think comparing the prize reward from a 1919 prize award of flying from Paris to NYC is accurate. I mean, people had already been flying. How many people put things into orbit, much less on the moon?
Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million. Granted you're only expected to send one and it's only to the moon, NASA does already have the infrastructure & experienced personel to do this. Even an 1/8 of that cost is 3 times the prize money.
Add the requirements of a 500 meter 'rove' and hi def 'Mooncast' and I think you're looking at too much risk for any person--possibly any company.
Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough. I know it may sound ridiculous but I personally think $300 million would start to entice competition. What intellectual property would you have in the end? You would have patents on specifically design tools for getting a piece of machinery to the moon only capable of Mooncasts & 500 meters of roving. I'm not so sure any company would try to enter this competition as it is a major investment and a major risk with very little gain.
My work here is dung.
Actually, this may be a matter of cost, not technology - a cost that may be easily regained by the winnings. Someone may just need the incentive to do it. Putting a man on the moon is hard...putting a robot...eh, not so much. We launch something out of orbit every few years now, so the tech is there. Heck, the expense may be designing the robot, not the delivery system.
It costs billions to put those guys on Mars.
Heck, it costs NASA billions to put them on the moon.
The point is to have private industry be able to do it for millions, or less.
Its not "Its been done before", its to make it possible to do it again, and again, and again.
Do it without putting the whole country into a deficit.
Make that possible, and then maybe the impossible that costs trillions can use the same technology.
A hand-made car, only a few can afford.
Mass-produced cars, we all can afford.
Get the space technology to that level, and finally we'll be able to really explore outside our planet.
Will this robotic rover obey the moon's robots.txt? (It's available by querying the Tycho crater).
FYI the robots.txt for Jupiter's Galilean moons looks like this:
They just got themselves an airstrip that will cost them 1.3 million dollars a year just so they would not have to deal with airport traffic and your worried about a measly $30,000,000 for a contest that stands a good chance of not being won by the deadline?
They seem to hemorrhage money sometimes.
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
You can't even buy a launch for $30 million, never mind develop and manufacture a lander.
I beg to differ. You can buy a human-safe launch, stay on the ISS, and return to Earth for $30m. You can get a lift to LEO with an LM-2C for $20m.
30 million for such a feat? Bah! There will be no serious contestants. We need to pass around the hat and get that up to a reputable figure that will bring out the serious engineers and rocket scientists.
I'll do my part. The pot is now up to $30,000,005.00.
That's cash money!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Prizes work great on the low-budget front, but not so great on the high budget front. On the low-budget front, you have a far wider pool of idealistic individuals who can individually or collectively afford it, plus a lot of businesses which see it as a way to buy publicity. When you get to the sort of budgets that lunar missions require, both of these sources of money essentially disappear. Instead, you're subject to the government and Wall Street. The government, by the nature of the prize, is automatically ruled out. Wall Street doesn't like to throw money on projects that promises a small chance of getting only a portion of your invested costs paid back.
In short, this isn't going anywhere, and Google knows it. Sure, it doesn't hurt to offer the prize. It's essentially free publicity for Google.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
You mean like Congress?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Are they awarding the prize for the post-launch delivery, or does the organization have to design the ground-based launch vehicle too? Governments aren't too keen on private enterprises developing their own ICBM's, yunno.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Because once they have the design for the rover, it's easy to mod to include a dye for moon dust, and then Google will send the modded one up to draw Google's logo on the moon. *please mod informative*
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The Apollo program has paid for itself at least a hundred times over, in direct economic benefits, by creating entire new industries, and spawning more new technology than you can imagine, much of which is used in every day life.
http://www.ethicalatheist.com/docs/benefits_of_space_program.html
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html
http://www.fas.org/news/usa/2000/usa-001012.htm
http://www.look-to-the-skies.com/space_program_spinoffs.htm
http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9811/02/space.medical/index.html
And on and on and on.
As a percentage of our national budget, NASA's $16-17B per year is pretty trivial. Then factor in that they do a lot of research for the military, and another chunk is much more general research, often materials science, biology, and aircraft-related (remember, it's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The big eye catching projects like the shuttle are just a fraction of what NASA does with what is just a tiny fraction of the US's 3 trillion dollar annual budget.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
If Google can throw millions of dollars at something like this, then it is extremely disappointing that they are not funding the next stage of Dr. Bussard's work. For a small fraction of this prize, they could verify the Polywell IEC fusion concept. In addition to solving our energy and pollution problems, this is probably the single quickest way to enabling large scale space activity. Without a space elevator or at least nuclear rockets, any large scale space activity will be impossible anyway.
For those who missed it, Dr. Bussard gave a talk at Google, and the video is available here.
I think the odds of this being won in the next 20 years (and they only have 5 years to do this) are pretty small. This is similar to Branson's prize he's offering for removing CO2 from the atmosphere at some rather significant rate; the challenge to be surpassed in meeting the qualifications are high enough that there is little chance of having to make a payout.
If they do have to make a payout, the publicity is huge, and it's certainly possible that they have some commercial return in mind...perhaps rights to the rover design. I think the field of contenders will be small and weak, because the challenge is significant and the prize amount is unlikely to match the cost. At least for the original X-prize there was a hypothesized market for system developed as a result.
Of course, if I'm going to say this on Slashdot, I'd better be prepared to back it up:
The guidelines are that it must soft-land on the moon by the end of 2012, roam 500+ meters, and send back video and pictures. The basic prize is $20 million. If it can be done by 2014, the prize is $15 million. There is an additional $5 million if a second lander (by any competitor) to land by 2014. There is a bonus $5 million for extra duties like roaming 5000+ meters, photographing existing man-made objects on the moon, surviving the 14 day lunar night, or discovering water-ice.
The requirements and bonus objectives are roughly inline with the design parameters of the Mars Exploration Rovers. I'm sure a private group can build a device with that kind of capabilities for less than $30 million. However, I'm positive they can't get it to the moon for that little.
Landing a meaningful payload on the moon requires a fairly decent-sized launch vehicle. If we assume a mass similar to the old Surveyor Lunar landers, which were about 1/3 as heavy as the MER's (landing mass, not mobile mass) and not mobile, then we can start looking at launch vehicles capable of sending it on it's way.
The Surveyors were launched on Atlas-Centaur rockets, which have an LEO payload of about 5000 pounds. There isn't anything directly comparable currently on the market. There's few offerings that are too small. A Falcon 1 ($8 million, 1500 pounds) won't cut it. A Falcon 9, on the other hand would be significant overkill, with 21,000 pound LEO capacity and a $35 million price tag.
A Russian Dnepr would probably be the best bet. These converted ICBM's are what Bigelow hired to launch his two prototype inflatable modules with. It has an 8000 pound LEO capacity and costs $15-20 million.
So you're left with $5-10 million (because the last $5 million are only available to a second mission) to develop and build the rover (piece of cake), but also a reliable landing platform and an earth departure stage. The latter can probably be adapted from existing upper stage products, but the first two are being done from scratch.
I just can't imagine that much work being accomplished, even with heavy use of volunteer labor, for that price.
However, if somebody out there has got the money to front and wants a mechanical engineer to work for peanuts part time on such a nerdy project, the above doesn't mean I'm not interested.
Popular Mechanics' space correspondent, who's been in the trenches with Burt Rutan, Steve Fossett and Buzz Aldrin, comes out HARD against the lunar X Prize, calling it a publicity stunt. And why not?
The USSR sent robots to the moon in 1970 and 1973. Big, car-sized rovers. They worked well, too. Lunokhod 1 was operational for 322 days, and and Lunokhod 2 for about four months. $1 travelled about 10km, and #2 travelled a total of 37km, so those large vehicles got around quite a bit.
It would be possible to redo that mission today. Lunokhod 3, never launched, is in a museum. Improved versions of the Proton booster used in 1970 are available from International Launch Services. The lunar landing module would have to be newly constructed, but the design is proven.