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."

Comments

What's the controversy?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:What's the controversy?

[mdwh2]

Indeed - given the difficult of doing this at all, I would hope that teams take as many advantages as they can, as opposed to making it arbitrarily harder just to maintain some illusion of "fairness".

The purpose of the competition is to get a rover on the moon, and to encourage private space exploration. The competition is not "having space travel done by people with no experience".

Why is this an unfair advantage?

[krgallagher]

"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.' "

Why is this unfair? Here is the summarized requirements from the Google Lunar X-Prize home page:

COMPETITION GUIDELINES: To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a "Mooncast", back to Earth.

PRIZES: The total purse of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is $30 million (USD).
GRAND PRIZE: A $20 million Grand Prize will be awarded to the team that can soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a Mooncast back to Earth. The Grand Prize is $20M until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15M until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation
SECOND PRIZE: A $5 million Second Prize will be offered as well, providing an extra incentive for teams to continue to compete, and increasing the possibility that multiple teams will succeed. Second place will be available until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation
BONUSES: An additional $5 million in bonus prizes can be won by successfully completing additional mission tasks such as roving longer distances (> 5,000 meters), imaging man made artifacts (e.g. Apollo hardware), discovering water ice, and/or surviving through a frigid lunar night (approximately 14.5 Earth days). The competing lunar spacecraft will be equipped with high-definition video and still cameras, and will send images and data to Earth, which the public will be able to view on the Google Lunar X PRIZE website.

MOONCAST: The Mooncast consists of digital data that must be collected and transmitted to the Earth composed of the following:
High resolution 360 panoramic photographs taken on the surface of the Moon;
Self portraits of the rover taken on the surface of the Moon;
Near-real time videos showing the craft's journey along the lunar surface;
High Definition (HD) video;
Transmission of a cached set of data, loaded on the craft before launch (e.g. first email from the Moon).
Teams will be required to send a Mooncast detailing their arrival on the lunar surface, and a second Mooncast that provides imagery and video of their journey roaming the lunar surface. All told, the Mooncasts will represent approximately a Gigabyte of stunning content returned to the Earth.
The complete Google Lunar X PRIZE Competition Guidelines are available in English, the official language of the prize, on the Google Lunar X PRIZE homepage.

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?

Hardly an advantage

[evanbd]

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.

Re:Hardly an advantage

[dbolger]

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.

I would say you could stop the costs ballooning by hiring NASA engineers, and not NASA bureaucrats. I have been of the opinion for some time that the problem with NASA is that it is expected to do too little science with too much money (don't hate me!). Give these people ten million and tell them to get to the moon, and you will come out with a lean, well designed system that can get there and do what you want. Give them one hundred million and you'll get a bloated project with too many unnecessary people on board and too much red tape to do anything properly. That is the whole point of things like the X-Prize. The knowledge and experience are out there. The technology (or close to it) is out there. The scientific community is slowly coming to the realisation that leaving things like this to government agencies will not give results. NASA has provided the groundwork without which none of this would be possible, but it is time to take what we have learned there, and run with it.

May have to rethink some ideas

[Billosaur]

To optimize power efficiency, the robot must be as light as possible - but to operate the coring drill, the vehicle also has to be massive enough to apply sufficient downward pressure on the drill and counter the torque of the rotating drill, Carnegie Mellon noted. It is estimated that Scarab must weigh at least 250 kilograms, or about 550 pounds.

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.

Re:May have to rethink some ideas

[name_already_taken]

I haven't read up on lunar drilling, but wouldn't it make sense to use a rotary hammer (hammer drill)? Short impacts can overcome the resistance of the surface being drilled, without overcoming the average (over time) force exerted by gravity.

Fairness

[benhocking]

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.

If you want to help compete, get in touch with him

[CrazyJim1]

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.

Getting rid of the torque should be easy

[Solandri]

Just use two counter-rotating drills simultaneously. Might be tricky when you first start and one bit bites into the rock before the other, but once they're both in the torque just gets converted into tensile and compressive stresses in the cojoining structure (like in a Chinook helicopter)

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.

Hardly an unfair advantage

[raddan]

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.

Getting there is half the fun

[peacefinder]

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.]