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Private Company First to Take on Lunar X Challenge
explosivejared writes "A private company by the name of Odyssey Moon has become the first team to complete registration for Google's Lunar X Challenge. They will likely be competing with several heavyweights in the field, as Carnegie Mellon University, along with many others, has already expressed an interest in the competition."
Thats no Odyssey Moon, its a Tycho Magnetic Anomaly!
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
Private company first to contribute space debris.
So they offer US 10 Million to simply get a craft into space twice within two weeks. Any self respecting nerd knows that the challenges of even getting into orbit are a lot higher. Yet, for this challenge, you need to get a craft into orbit, then TO the moon, orbit the moon, land on the moon, then deploy your vehicle and move it around. And they only double the prize to US 20 million? Wow, talk about incentive. I think they're a little low on the reward by a factor of 10 or 20.
Currently, Dilbert contains material related comics.
For example:
http://www.comics.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2007152781206.gif
Coincidence ?
Google has released quite an interesting report about this.
I'm eagerly waiting for this to develope. It's all stuff that has been done by a government agency, but a private company is certainly bound to be more efficient and productive, lowering the costs of lunar travel. This is serious fuel for a new space war, when prices go down, and it ends up becoming something normal for the people. Let the free market do its thing.
It is following the exact path of civil aviation. I have high hopes of it developing in the same way.
Sorry, a bit of daydreaming is good for me... let the SciFi lover in me have a bit of fun.
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The majority of computer users are stupid, mindless sheep.
They are the ones whose eyes will glaze over with delight when they fondle the next Wintendo offering in the stores.
They are the same who when asked what kind of computer they have respond "Windows".
These are the people who are nothing more than virtual nipples to be milked for money and spread the dark philosophies coming from the Electronic Mordor.
Chains fall upon us all by the rule of big corporate devils because of the permissiveness of the mass public.
In time if this idiocy continues, all open source will be illegal at the whim of corporation number one with the votes in the politicians pockets.
Lovers of open source need to make their voices heard peacefully before it's too late.
Open source hippies they call some of us, failing to realise that the hippy culture served to stir more action and thought than much of the current generations of pale skinned, overweight, ipod clutching couch lizards who whine if they're not in an air conditioned environment and forced to walk further than a block for anything.
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This should be in every interplanetary hitch-hiker guide : Delta-V budget
The energy budget to go from Low-Earth Orbit to the moon is half of the one to go from earth to LEO. So I would say that the reward is surprisingly on-spot. Of course this is not taking into consideration the fact that the weight of a spacecraft increase exponentially the closer it comes to escape velocity, and the fact that lunar landing, lunar-earth telecommunications, space travel are a different kind of challenge than in the Ansari X-prize, but I think that 15 millions are quite fair for this.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'm normally the first to be wary of businesses and the whole corporate idea, but given Congress's penchant for stripping NASA's budget, this seems like it's going to be necessary to jumpstart any exploration of space. The possibility of civil space travel is far off, but the possibility of discovery is immediate. Space travel has a special way of presenting all new angles of attacking problems that have historically led to fantastic inventions. Having a private monopoly on space research would be bad, but using market forces to stimulate is a great idea in my book, though.
I got a catholic block.
One of the companies behind the project is MDA (MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates) out of Richmond BC, the Canadian company that buils the Canadarm for the Space Shuttle, and the Canadarm 2, which is on the Space Station. So these people are really "rocket scientists" from Canada, and other places around the world.
ttyl
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You know how the chinese people will get there first? They will climb one upon another, stepping on the shoulders, one chinese above one chinese, above another, above another, above another...
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You don't need to recoup all the winner's costs. You just need to give the company a bit of a reward to help them get back out of the red more quickly.
Take the $10M prize, as an example. It is estimated that the winning team spent around $25M to win that $10M. But they now have a contract with Virgin Galactic to build many more vehicles, because they have the know-how and a workable basic design.
The goal is to stimulate, not to reimburse all costs.
baatled in court, they are Come on
>>Sure, some fishermen had semi permanent settlements on the the south pole
What exactly would one fish for at the South Pole? Wikipedia describes it as "a featureless windswept icy plateau at an altitude of 2,835 meters (9,306 ft), about 800 miles (1,300 km) from the nearest sea" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole).
I do, however agree with the spirit of your post. I have never seen a business model for the Moon that makes sense, even with far-flung technology.
Apollo 1 was a pretty damn big hitch.
Even if we just look at the Apollo 11 mission itself, there were hitches. For one thing, the landing went "long" and that "computing power" was taking them toward a rock-strewn crater. If Armstrong hadn't taken manual control for the landing, things might've gotten really hitched.