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NASA Offering $2 Million Prize for Lunar Lander
coondoggie writes "If you build it, NASA will not only come, it'll give you $2 million dollars for your troubles. The space agency today said it will offer $2 million in prizes if competing teams can successfully build a lunar lander at the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at Holloman Air Force Base, in Alamogordo, N.M. Oct. 27 and 28th. To win the prize, teams must demonstrate a rocket-propelled vehicle and payload that takes off vertically, climbs to a defined altitude, flies for a pre-determined amount of time, and then lands vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad. After landing, the vehicle must take off again within a predetermined time, fly for a certain amount of time and then land back on its original launch pad."
The thing I always wondered about these kinds of contests, like the x prize, is doesn't it cost more to build your craft than you win?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Too... Easy...
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I haven't been paying attention much to other groups, but Armadillo Aerospace is already very close to meeting that mission profile.
The space agency today said it will offer $2 million in prizes if competing teams can successfully build a lunar lander
Do they give you a bonus for also constructing a sound stage that looks like a lunar surface?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Surely the mechanics of the device would be significantly different on the moon vs. on Earth?
Surely the enormous difference in atmospheric pressure and gravity mean the only thing that's reasonably useful is the guidance mechanism?
Any rocket scientists out there have any idea what the real benefit of the challenge is?
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
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Nevermind the lander... Given that Microsoft paid $240 million for 1% of facebook, how long until someone offers a milti-million dollar prize to build a laser that can carve their corporate logo into the surface of the moon?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
We've seen the X prize for private space travel, so why isn't there an X prize for the lunar lander? Or is the X foundation saying they think it's already been done and hence not really in need of a monetary prize for doing it again?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I just copied the actual lunar lander, and added this cool racing stripe.
A company from long island should try. The cradle of aviation museum has one of the original landers. It was going to be used on one of the missions that got cancelled. That would be a great recource in building another one. (Long Island was home to grumman before they went under and got bought by northrop)
Should be 7,500 lunar landers. :-) Moreover, each one should be designed from scratch.
I think this loosly describes throwing a ball twice upwards and catching it, as long as you can do it in a predictable way.
...takes off vertically, climbs to a defined altitude, flies for a pre-determined amount of time, and then land vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad. After landing, the vehicle must take off again within a predetermined time, fly for a certain amount of time and then land back on its original launch pad. Er, don't helicopters do this? Grow the moon an atmosphere (Anybody see the movie Red Planet?) and it'll fly there too.It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
NASA is now outsourcing its jobs.
Trying the X-prize model might be just the right way to tackle this.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
where we already went 40 years ago with computers that would be 0wned by a calculator today. Way to go firing up the imaginations of the next generation of space scientists, NASA.
Yeah, good point. If China is already in space, why should we bother? We'll just let them have space. Who needs space exploration, anyway? That couldn't ever possibly benefit mankind or anything.
It makes me sad that almost 40 years later, they have to reinvent the technology from scratch.
We should be competing for a Mars lander by now.
$2M for a working rocket spaceship
$2B for a half-assed video hosting site Youtube
I am the only one saddened by this?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
NASA must have their heads in the sand, because the private sector has already accomplished said task.
- difference in gravity between moon and earth
- atmosphere here, none there
- etc
Remember that there's recently been *much* talk about actual landings on planetary bodies other than the moon (mars, anyone) where variable factors mentioned above will still be a consideration, but "simply" (for want of a better term) different values for the same problem.For those who're reading slashdot while still mostly asleep/inebriated/high
If you don't know how to build a car, building a world-land-speed-record-breaking car is *very difficult*, if you regularly design and build performance cars for a living, it is a significantly less complex problem.
How many years did it take men to build a working powered flying machine? How many years *after* that before they tweaked the design for
- Passenger flights
- supersonic flights
- heavy lifting caro capacity
- remote-controlled flight
- etc
Seems Nasa has realized that being an overbloated government controlled bureaucracy is not necessarily conducive to rocket-science/heavy-engineering/economically-optimal-solutions (ie stuff they are supposed to be achieving).Perhaps now NASA will focus more on hard-science and rely on commercial enterprise to handle issues like basic-engineering and economical solutions.
Government science projects should not be expected/required to be economically viable/turn a profit - their research is for the generic betterment of mankind and should be available to all. Commercial interests should not be relied upon (certainly not exclusively) to carry out the brunt of core scientific research - much scientific research is *exceedingly* expensive with no obvious expectation of Return On Investment (the space program has "struck it lucky" with many useful and commercial inventions as a result, but nobody said "lets put a man on the moon because we need to invent microwave ovens").
If only we could convince *all* world governments to use 90% of their military budget for scientific research. Wars could be prosecuted with personal combat (trial by arms) and we'd have cured cancer/aids/parkinsons/the-common-cold years ago.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Will they let the chinese show up? Or maybe the Japanese?
FYI, the Chinese and Japanese craft (while cool) are orbiting lunar probes, not landers. The Chinese are eventually planning on doing a lunar lander, but that won't be until 2012 at the earliest.
We're all entitled to our opinions about how NASA is running their show, but even still, I have to disagree with your post.
From what I saw on those links you pointed out, those projects have very different goals from the lunar lander challenge. In both cases (as far as the articles made clear) the respective countries were running state-sponsored (not privately funded) programs to get their gadgets into orbit around the moon to take measurements, test out equipment, etc, without ever touching down. The lunar lander challenge, on the other hand, isn't really about the moon part, so much as the lander part (hell, the challenge takes place on earth). My understanding is that it is geared towards developing privately funded solutions capable of performing a task roughly equivalent to what a helicopter can do (vertical takeoff, controlled flight, vertical landing), but without an atmosphere. It's not nearly as much of a marvel as putting a probe in orbit and mapping out a planet (or moon), as NASA has already done (though maybe not to the degree that these new projects plan to), but it's privately funded, and I believe it is done in the name of making future trips to other planets cheaper. NASA's $2M prize is nothing compared to what the various companies could (and probably already have) shell out, so in fact this is actually a money-saver for NASA. If/when we have any sort of permanent setup on the moon, whether it is a colony of humans or an automated ore-extracting plant, or whatever, we will need this capability. Sure, we have it (NASA has done it, and with people onboard to boot), but the basement designers will, out of necessity, find ways to do it that are cheaper, requiring less-exotic materials, less human interaction, etc. These groups will explore the problem space in a way more akin to how the Russians developed much of their space technology (fly it until it breaks, redesign until it flies again, rinse, repeat... which resulted in some pretty bulletproof systems).
Opinions about NASA aside, I would personally like to see us build colonies off of this planet. Maybe we've got plenty of time left on this one, maybe not, but we don't really know, and I would love to visit the moon one day. And if I can develop something in my basement that makes that more affordable for the next generation, I'm gonna give it a try.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
I think I could do it, using the tumbler from a cement truck and some off the shelf hardware.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
lunar means moon
moon means ass (noun-to-verb casting)
therefore, it is a $2 million prize for ass lander
well then, ejection seat companies now have another $2 million in their pocket.
proud caffeine whore
ONLY $2 million? You've got to be joking.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
is that NASA, like the DOD, heavily overpays the industry, but will then go real cheap on these prizes. It is 2 million for a lunar lander, while Google offers 30 million for a lunar rover (which is NOT that much past a rover).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...Some of the kiddies won't even remember this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(computer_game)
I think this contest would be much more appealing if some members of the team who created it actually got to use it on the moon.
Is there any reason why the previous design won't "work"? Seems like we've done the before at some point.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
I guess it's all about priorities. It's touchy-feel-good to watch ourselves on tv & oh-so enchanting. The hours of self-amusement keeps us out of trouble, you know?
Been there, done that... 60 million dollars and several hundred people. Meanwhile, Armadillo has done it for a couple of million (at most), and seven volunteers working two days a week.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Will they let the chinese show up? Or maybe the Japanese?
;-)
Well, it'll pretty much have to be done outside the US, now that anyone in the country playing around with amateur rocketry is automatically classified as a ("suspected") terrorist and sent off to some other country for "interrogation". But it doesn't have to be Chinese or Japanese; it could be Canadians or Mexicans. (Or maybe Iraqis or Iranians.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Oh well, not a bad sum though. This approach has proven to work well with other contest's like DARPA's Grand Challenge.
In some ways, it's probably tougher on Earth, because you don't have the wind to deal with on the moon.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Granted, a helicopter would not work on the airless Moon. Granted, a wheeled (or caterpillared) rover may not be suitable for large distances either.
But there may be other designs. For example, the macropods are able to hop over long distances using relatively little energy. The tendons in their large (macro) legs (pods) act as springs allowing them to reuse about 70% of the energy for the next jump (humans only reuse 5-10% on each step).
I suppose, a vehicle could be built to use the same principle. It may not work well on Earth (due to the remaining limitations of our technology), but on Moon, with its 5 times lesser gravity, jumping should be quite efficient...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Don't be so negative. Given a choice, I would pay $2 million for a working spaceship and let some idiot pay $2 billion for a website any day. That's a hell of a lot better than the other way around!
The original designers of all that equipment have either retired or died. The manufacturing methods were too slow anyway. It's also possible that some of the components may have even become outlawed because of environmental concerns (lead solder or maybe some really toxic fuels). Does the lander HAVE to be wrapped in gold foil like the LEM? I have heard that the price of copper is going through the roof. It just makes sense to completely re-invent the technology, and start fresh.
I'm not worried about the technology, it's the implementation and deployment that bothers me. Why bother to design a lander that runs off of sunlight and generates its own oxygen from waste products when it's going to be launched by people who can't tell the difference between yards and meters? It might not even make it to the moon. Those knuckleheads will probably send it towards Omicron Persei 8.
IIRC, there is indeed a bounty on producing an accurate enough representation of lunar regolith. Of course, it doesn't have to *look* like the moon, but it has to *act* like the moon.
That's no moon.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Has anyone thought that the reason why they're outsourcing this research is the fact that they simply do not know it in the first place? To me I'd say we've never been to the moon, and the U.S.'s space agencie(s) (NASA) couldn't get itself on that rock if it tried (at the current moment at least), so they're getting people thinking "Well it mustn't be that hard if we've done this before (as a country) so let's give it a go." Sadly paints the picture of NASA not having enough citizen support to be able to get the proper cash from the feds to fund all those new technologies we'll be needing as a species to survive, so it has to resort to those private parties that are already interested in the subject/research to do it's dirty work for it.
more news that makes me go "we're doomed"
It's aimed at getting private developers to develop technology that none of the world's governments seem to be working on (i.e. quick turnaround).
And fucking cheap, which I suspect is the real motivation. Does he have any idea how much any potential Chinese or Japanese or European or even US-built technologies cost to do something comparable? Orders of magnitude more than $2 million (which is the prize, not the development cost, so one would assume the expected development cost should be even lower than that). The Apollo Lunar Module cost about $50 million in 1969 dollars, and it was less advanced than what they're aiming for this time.
Random and weird software I've written.
Does somebody accept bet on China team?
this one time... at computer camp... I shoved a linux cd in my windows computer
I'll build my own lunar lander! With Blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack!
Didn't NASA already build one of these ??? ... Like 40 years ago ? The whole wasteful bureaucracy needs to be revamped. We are getting our but kicked by other countries who are building the equipment to go to the moon, ect. And we were the first ones there !! This is shameful.
I used to rock at that Lunar Lander video game. Remember it ? You had to fire your burner to make a slow controlled landing. If only the controls are the same, I can fly it !
I already have my design ready.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
NASA and the DoD have done this before, with the Delta Clipper. It ended up plagued by the usual NASA issues and belittled by its immature big brother. Getting this out from under NASA may provide the needed boost (and I'm a NASA...booster).
What would it take to develop and use a lunar air/gas plane? I tried to look up what the atmosphere on the moon is and while I didn't find it exactly I saw that one does exist.
Just call Nigerian Helicopter Guy.
They faked building one of them, does that count?
I wonder if John Carmack could pull it off?