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First 10 Teams in $30M Google Lunar X Prize Announced
coondoggie writes to mention that the first ten teams racing for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize have been announced. The competitors will try to be the first team to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon capable of traveling at least 1,600 feet and returning video, images, and data. The teams include Romanian-based ARCA, Italy-based Team Italia, and several different teams from around the US, many of which competed in the Ansari X Prize.
Romulans are competing!
This is a much better challenge than the X-prize, which didn't even include orbit. It was amusing to watch, but really not a huge deal imo.
I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission, even if someone does end up winning the prize.
Google's Sergei Brin was heard to scream "PIKACHU! I CHOOSE YOU!" shortly after the announcement.
Federation fools! Our ship is already on your moon, but it cleverly cloaked, so you'll just have to take our word for it and send us the $1 million
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Come on lads!
:-)
You don't need a parachute to land on the moon, don't let the failure of that Mars thingy stop you
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Where's John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace? I would think that these guys would jump at a chance like this since they could use some promotion after what happened last year.
to see if the U.S. really did land on the moon.
You know that they are doing this so they can index all the space dust on the moon.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071214_003618.html
He promised!
Infuriate left and right
What is the desired end result of this competition? Developing methods that have a low cost-per-launch? Stimulating private space travel?
Where is Armadillo Aerospace? So far they're the only contenders to fly in the contest and they're not even on the list.
I guess that's the next cool Google idea?
The X Prize and this competition differ from competitions early in the aviation era, to which they're routinely compared, in that they aren't for doing something no one's ever done before. Suborbital flight was achieved in the 1960s, both by NASA and by the Air Force with the X-15 program. Landing on the Moon and sending back photos was achieved by the Soviets and Americans in the mid 1960s.
What presumably is the point to these new prizes is not the achievement per se, which merely duplicates something done forty years ago, but the goal of doing so much more cheaply, and with the ability to do it much more routinely. Those are reasonable goals: after all, the principal failure of the Space Shuttle is that it can't be launched nearly as often and easily as it was supposed to be. If it had eventually been able to fly 20 times a year to LEO on a routine basis, which was what was promised in the 80s, and which would've brought its per-flight cost down to an extremely modest $60-100 million, we would be now hailing its unqualified success.
So I think the virtue of the X Prize was not its goal of suborbital flight per se, but the goal of suborbital flight with the same craft twice in a short period (a week, as I recall). Doing it rapidly is at least proof of concept evidence that you've found a way to do it cheaply and routinely. And I'm disappointed that this new competition doesn't seem to have that element. I'm not sure how it could. Maybe they would have been better off going for a similar X Prize competition for actual orbital flight, e.g. can you fly to orbit twice in the same week. That would be a real achievement.
I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission
It's a totally token amount. Merely launching a geostationary satellite on an Ariane 5 rocket costs over $100 million. Presumably if you compete seriously you're in it for the glory.
Back then we had a good chuck of our nation/economy solely dedicated to developing a space program, now we have nothing but bloat and underfunding.
It really is piss poor what Bush has done to science. Bushs' vision of mars is nothing but a political tool to get temporary ratings approval in the polls. Fact is, his vision is severely underfunded, uninspired, and uneducated. Nasa has done some great things with the tools they have. But when you compare Bushs' failed war in iraq and afghanistan and the funds it took to fight them, compared to the Nasa budget it is pitiful.
Imagine if we took that trillion dollar surplus and some real inspiration and dedicated 400 billion to the space program instead of way. A good president would cut out the bureaucracy (with still keeping quality assurance) and size down Nasa's management, and their space vehicles (last time i checked we are using 30+ year old shuttle technology, what exactly is going to happen again when the shuttle retires? There is no clear cut plan, also sad).
It's the sound of things screeching to a halt.
Building an extremely high altitude plane (which is what won the first prise) is one (impressive!) thing.
Getting into and beyond Earth orbit is an entirely different and vastly more difficult ball game (not to mention the robotics work necessary). While a winner for this prize might eventually emerge, don't hold your breath.
how can we expect a bunch of amatures to do it?
It's going to be a lot harder to fake this one.
Work Safe Porn
Di didnt see a time frame in that article. How many years are we going to have to wait?
...the italians already won the competition for the most original team name. Forza ragazzi!
My laptop probably has more computing power than that first mission did, so it can't be impossible to put a robot on the moon with today's hardware. I honestly think the only expensive part of the project will be the costs of fuel and contracting the production of various parts. This mission doesn't have to have the large amount of safety features the lunar mission did, since we aren't carrying people, just machines. If you didn't want to retrieve the equipment, you could build a rocket, launch it at the moon and jettison a landing pod when aligned. Obviously more complicated in practice than in concept, but it's actually less complicated than what we did in the space race.
I welcome anyone who can prove otherwise, this is just my speculation.
Is this the first step to building Google's moon base?
Both of them do not have the required infrastructure to make it happen TODAY. It will require in general low cost. But it will drive companies to compete and make this. From a posting that I did last night concerning this:
Most no-one thinks the Google Lunar X-Prize will be won.. and that's just soft-landing a rover on the Moon by 2015.
Hummmm. Everybody swore that America's space prize was un-winnable. And yet, I think that Musk will win it, with the remote possibility that several others could still do it. By the same token, I would be surprised to not see musk pursue the Lunar X-prize. The easy way is work with armadillo or perhaps blue origin. Why use one of those? Because they make a very nice lunar transporter.
Bigelow has a great deal in mind. I know that you have seen what he is up to. He is wanting to land his systems straight down on the moon. Once it is there, he will need transport up and down for cargo and ppl, hence the reason that Musk/(carmack or bezos). Keep in mind that it is the prizes that is allowing Musk to make money. He was won cots (270M), shooting for American's space prize which is 50M, and will almost certainly land contracts with DOD, NASA, and Bigelow, in addition, to picking up more launches with other groups. If he can win the Lunar X-prize with a partner who can provide the lunar access, then he will have helped created the market that Bigelow (and others) want desperately.
My prediction: Musk wins the American space prize, followed by Lunar X prize, and then bigelow is on the moon by 2016, and MAYBE, just maybe, even 2015. That is only 7-8 years away. Sounds like a lot, but the x-prize was won in 8 years ago and that was with ZERO infrastructure. Now, there is an up and coming infrastructure, with multiple prizes to lead the way.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Wrong. In the 60's hardware/development was the big cost, but these days it is ALWAYS insurance and covering your legal butt. That will be the biggest cost, guaranteed. If you rocket screws up and hits a metro area, well, you have to have a pretty big policy to cover that. And some good defense lawyers.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Team FREDNET, Team Cringely, and Interplanetary Ventures are all friendly groups of people to look into. Cringely has a wiki up for his project, and FREDNET has a rover going, and Interplanetary Ventures has facebook presence. I did a link dump a few days ago, so go check out all of the teams -- they need contributors, even web programmers willing to bootstrap the communities.