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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.
to see if the U.S. really did land on the moon.
I'd say its two-fold. To show the possibility of privately funded interplanetary exploration, and to support the development of low cost, space-capable robotics.
I doubt that anyone will be trying to develop their own launch vehicle to do this, although a custom trans-lunar injection stage might be in the cards. One of the upcoming Falcon 1-extended versions may have the juice to get a small but capable rover to the lunar surface, bringing this reasonably within cost restrictions.
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.
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.