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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.
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.
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.
Agree to that. The 6x gravity on Earth vs moon, as well as all ballistic and overheating problems associated with the atmosphere, would not be present on the moon. For other issues it's vice versa, like requiring a completely airtight compartment for lunar landing and withstanding the pressure difference (BTW, due to properties of material resistance, building a vessel that has internal pressure higher than external (spaceship, lander) is MUCH tougher than a vessel with external pressure higher than internal (submarine).
The lunar lander used in the Apollo programs would never be able to perform a landing on Earth. And building an Earth lander for use on the moon would grossly inflate your fuel use compared to what you need, increasing the lander's weight and worsening consequences of a potential fuel leak/ignition.
The difference in conditions is not trivial at all, it is different to the point where the resources required to build such a "vessel" exceed the transferable benefit.
Oh, and the $2M prize for any kind lunar lander prototype is a joke. Try $200M.
I just copied the actual lunar lander, and added this cool racing stripe.
And then there's the whole fun of it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...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.
ah but that is the point. without having to deal with air resistance, and only 1/6 the gravity if you can go 150 feet up on earth you can easily go 1000 feet away from the moon. You also need that increase in fuel as one would be trying to reach lunar orbit. which because of the amazing 1/6 gravity difference is a heck of a lot easier.
So any vessel that could survive in earth's atmosphere doing such tests would be already 75% done for lunar module.
Also the company that does it will most likely win the $2 billion dollar contract to build the lunar module for the government. or at least $100 million dollar help us get started fee.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The more difficult course, Level 2, requires the rocket to hover for twice as long before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface, packed with craters and boulders to mimic actual lunar terrain. The hover times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform the real lunar mission.http://space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge/
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
...Some of the kiddies won't even remember this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(computer_game)
They made it too big to fit through the studio doors :-)
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Wouldn't overheating be an even bigger problem on the moon? There's no atmosphere to conduct/convect away waste heat.
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.
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"