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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.
My senior design project is to design a mission from the ground up that could potentially compete in the competition. Our preliminary budgets are coming in around $20-30 million, so it's not impossible to do it for that price. What most people don't realize is that you don't have to send a 1000 kg rover to the moon, we are looking at a mass to the moon of about 75-100 kg. This allows you to use much smaller launch vehicles which are considerably cheaper, in fact we only need to get about 800 kg to LEO which can be done for under $10 million. Additionally most of the technology is already in place to do this, so there wouldn't be a lot of development costs.
Well, this sounds rather nitpicky. You can't define "suborbital" flight only in terms of velocity, either, or rocket sleds and railgun projectiles would qualify. Is it even interesting?
I suggest the natural understanding of "suborbital" flight is flight which goes very high, pretty much out of the atmosphere, but which isn't up to orbital velocity. By that definition the X-15 qualifies, and so does SS1. The SR-71 does not, and as an air-breather is really in an entirely different category.
Any IRBM or ICBM qualifies, including the V-2, of course, but since I was talking in the context of the X Prize, which specified manned flight, it's a very natural to exclude it. Manned orbital or suborbital flight is quite a different engineering challenge than unmanned flight.
In any event, I think if we were to play a game of "one of these things doesn't belong" with the set {Freedom 7,X-15,SR-71} then the correct one to drop would be the SR-71.
Actually, that's basically exactly what they have: a $20M first place, $5M second place, and $5M in bonuses. Another $2M bonus was just added to the competition if you launch out of the state of Florida.