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Carnegie Mellon To Compete In Google Lunar X-Prize
An anonymous reader writes "Google's Lunar X-Prize already has a prominent entry. William Whittaker, a researcher from Carnegie Mellon University said that he will be assembling a team to develope a robot that will be be competing for the $20 million grand prize. According to a TG Daily story, Whittaker has some unfair advantages, as he previously developed a lunar rover for NASA that 'can find concentrations of hydrogen, possibly water and other volatile chemicals on the moon that could be mined to produce fuel, water and air that are essential for supporting lunar outposts.' The Lunar X-Prize runs until the end of 2012 and Carnegie Mellon's announcement could be a first indication that researchers are taking this challenge very seriously."
How difficult would it be to build a lunar module large enough to accomodate ummmm lets say one Darl Mcbride?
liqbase
If I were organizing a team, I'd hire at least ex-NASA engineer with the appropriate experience if I could, too. AFAIK, there was nothing in the rules saying that they couldn't do that. In fact, I'm pretty sure both Jeff Bezos' team Blue Origin and Scaled Composites both had ex-NASA engineers working with them on the first X Prize.
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Is it really any surprise that researchers are taking such a challenge seriously? Most challenges of this nature generate a lot of interest. Not for the money(the cost of succeding often tend to exceed the size of the prize), but for the publicity and pride involved in succeeding. We are vain animals after all.
Nothing is impossible. We just haven't quite worked out how to do it yet.
Why is this unfair? Here is the summarized requirements from the Google Lunar X-Prize home page:
It sounds to me like Carnegie Mellon University has the right idea. There are quite a few talented rocket scientists out there. Why not utilize them as a resource?
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I get 4"/s = 1200'/h / 5280'/mi = 0.227 MPH.
There are several things to realize about this prize. First, the rover is very roughly a third of the work. I'd break into getting to LEO, getting to the lunar surface, and all the stuff on the surface (rover, video, communication, etc.).
If you're trying to do this on a budget comparable to the prize, each of those is very challenging. If you buy your orbital launch, the cheapest option is probably a SpaceX Falcon 1, which starts at $7M -- a third of your budget already. That means you get *one* attempt. This prize won't be won on the first flight of the hardware, not with a budget even approaching the $20M purse.
Getting from (Earth) orbit to the surface is tricky, but probably the easiest piece. Carmack is very close to demonstrating a large fraction of that with Pixel at the Lunar Lander Challenge in October. Left to do would be nontrivial navigation and a nontrivial performance boost. Here, buying the hardware you need certainly isn't off the shelf, but most of the pieces might be available. I suspect you'd find yourself blowing another large fraction of your budget even before the requisite development on this part.
The lunar rover and communications presents another set of challenges, which it sounds like CMU may well have experience with.
But, I'd say hiring NASA engineers is the wrong way to win this on a budget. NASA couldn't even begin to touch this prize for $100M. If you hire engineers who are used to working with budgets on a NASA size, you'll get a solution that costs NASA price tags, or close to them. If you want to spend a couple hundred million winning the prize, just to prove you can, it'll work -- but I would say that's kind of silly. I don't think this prize will be won for less than $20M, but I think it will be won for not a huge amount more.
Personally, I think Carmack and the rest of the people at Armadillo Aerospace are much more interesting to watch. If he continues at his current pace, he'll have hardware in LEO long before this prize expires, and on a much smaller budget than anyone has done before. And he's already been talking about what would be needed to win this prize. If you want to watch the interesting show, don't look to the people that say they'll do it the old way -- look to the people that want to do it orders of magnitude cheaper than it's been done before, by turning every piece of conventional wisdom on its head, and are busy proving they can rather than trumpeting their barely formed plans to the press.
The Apollo astronauts found out a hard truth about the surface of the Moon when the wen too drill deep core samples -- the Moon is pretty hard. Drilling required a lot of effort, even when they had appropriate equipment. Drills generated a lot of torque as they tried to penetrate the lunar hardpan. The lunar surface is apparently very compacted, unlike earthly soil which undergoes the action of weathering. I'm not sure 250 kilos will necessarily be enough unless they find an efficient method to hold the rover down to the surface as it drills.
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I agree completely. I think we often sacrifice too much in the name of "fairness". We should never make things harder for those entering at the lower-end, but we should not take away advantages of those at the upper-end, either. That said, there are some ways to improve fairness (you can never really achieve fairness, only make things more fair or less fair – or both) without sacrificing anything. Perhaps something akin to information sharing could help, for example.
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Check out who they are competing against.
I was a CMU grad when I barely(So barely I wouldn't count it) helped with the last X prize he did in the autonomous race in the desert. If you think you want to work on a project of this scale, you have something to offer, and you have enough money to live in Pittsburgh for a few years, then I recommend you contact him. He was really nice when we met.
God spoke to me.
Look, a rover is not necessarily wheeled. What happens if the pixel is used to jump around? If done right, the "lander" is the probe. More importantly, it can then do a dozen or more jumps. The biggest advantage is that spacex AND armadillo (or new shepard) would be ready by 2011 with TESTED platforms. Use spacex to get to the moon (perhaps with a lunar satellite or 2), and pixel or new shepard to get to the surface. That would have more than enough weight to serve as a stable drilling.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
news flash: putting "X" in a name is no longer hip, hasn't been since people were saying "Generation X" or "X Games".
It's like all those products that had "Millennium" or "2000" in the name.
New name: The Shocker Prize for Landing on Uranus
Minor point, but Blue Origin was not a contestant in the Ansari X Prize.
Getting sufficient down force sounds like it'd be the hard part. A few clamps or climbing cams might do the trick if you can find a good location to insert them.
Why are these contests and prizes all-or-nothing? Why not split the single goal and 30 million prize money into smaller goals and smaller chunks of prize money so more people can participate? Is there any reason why this xprize can't be split in two? One $15mil prize for designing a rocket to carry a 50lb payload to the moon, and another $15mil prize for designing a 50lb robot to land, roam around, and beam pictures back to earth? Could these not be split even further to make the contest challenges and prizes more attainable for guys who don't work at nasa or are involved in large research projects at universities?
I think these contests are great, but as the prizes get bigger and the goals become grander, will anybody be expected to participate in a potential all-or-nothing "Land a person on Mars" X-Prize for $10 billion dollars?.
If these contests and prizes are designed to spur research and development, split the contest goals up so more people can participate.
Now Google has provided an incentive to send some trash to a different rock. Screw thinking "Green", it's too late for that... Think "Gray"! Save the moon!
Never leave a dead horse unbeaten!
Robotics is hard. Landing on the moon is even harder.
Whittaker also has some previous experience with the DARPA Grand Challenge, the desert robotics race, which CMU (his team) lost both times. He obviously knows his stuff when it comes to mechanical engineering, and were it not for the Stanford team, CMU would have undoubtedly won. But the Stanford team showed that brainpower triumphed over the "brute force" methods that CMU used. Stanford tackled the "hard computer science" problem instead, and used a standard video camera instead of the laser rangefinders (and pre-computed waypoints) that CMU used. I would have liked to see the Challenge continue because I think that Stanford's surprise victory would have changed the race dramatically the following year.
There's a pretty entertaining NOVA documentary about it as well. My brother (an engineer) and I (a CS student) could help but laugh at and feel envy for the guy who built the self-guided motorcycle ("Ghost Rider").
So, yeah, CMU has Whittaker, and lots of money, but that almost doesn't matter.
I want to be a TSA guy at the Pittsburgh Spaceport!
I figure they can build it on the old slag heaps south of Squirrel Hill.
From what I've been reading*, they amatuer rocket community is giving this challenge a lot of thought. There are development plans that look realistically capable of putting a lander on the moon for a budget close to the size of the prize. (Although the timeframe is tight.) Some of these plans call for multiple attempts with anticipation of initial failures.
It seems that one of the hardest parts of the prize is the communications problem. The prize conditions specify approximately a gigabyte of data to be transmitted from the moon, with some data gathered on-site and some carried along by the vehicle. It turns out that the data rate necessary to transmit that much data within one lunar day seems to be higher than can realistically be achieved without an aimed high-gain antenna. That in turn puts a lower bound on the size of hardware that has to be landed on the moon.
[*: On the most fasciniating list I've ever lurked.]
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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Remember that RedZone failed to complete the first DARPA grand challenge (although they got the farthest of all competitors) and they came in second place at the second event. They are not unbeatable.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Saying "Google's X-Prize" is not correct. Much like a building or stadium that is named after a sponsor, the name and sponsor can change, but the owners remain the same. In this case, Google is the sponsor, and the X-Prize belongs to the X-Prize foundation.
Yep. http://www.google.com/search?q=four%20inches%20per%20second%20in%20mph
The robot is less than 10% of the work. If you put the communications on the lander you could do the whole robot part with an off the shelf RC car with new wheels and geared way down. I'd score it as follows: If you are Buying a ride to orbit: Robot 5% Communication 20% LEO to softland 70% Launcher integration 5% If you are also building a launcher: Getting to LEO 70% Softland 25% Everything else 5% I know something of what I speak I just spent a year preparing for the XPC and did not make it. (Unreasonable Rocket)
I initially read the researcher as William Shatner. Had me confused for a second.
The controversy should be the drilling of the moon. It's possible we could destroy evidence within the geology of the moon that could never be recovered. Our geological techniques and our ability to derive energy will both only continue to advance into the future. Why should we take a chance in destroying something precious, so close to Earth, when it is likely to be unnecessary in the future?