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SoCal Selene Group Drops Google Lunar X Prize Bid

Posted by timothy on from the lucky-thirteen dept.

anzha writes "On Saturday, after the vaunted First Team Summit was completed in Strasbourg, The Southern California Selene Group announced publicly that they are dropping out of the Google Lunar X Prize. Citing very strong differences in opinions over how the X Prize was being run, the team felt they could no longer participate. On the flip side, the X Prize Foundation announced at the team summit that there are four new teams. With the drop out, there are now thirteen official competitive teams. Assuredly, there are more to come."

9 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Its sad by phpmysqldev · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Its sad that bureaucracy has caused an entire team to become disillusioned with the competition. The spirit of this competition has always been in the name of science and exploration, but it is becoming more and more bureaucratic to make it 'fair' to everyone. If someone can obtain the materials they need and come up with an innovative way to accomplish the underlying mission, I say more power to them.

    1. Re:Its sad by phpmysqldev · · Score: 3, Interesting

      yeah nothing wrong with what you just said. but the team was mainly upset with the vagueness of many of the rules and questions they had about what could and couldn't be used. Its fine if you want strict rules for a contest like this, but you need well defined rules from the start in order for that model to be effectively followed

    2. Re:Its sad by evangellydonut · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Did you know that if a solar flare had occurred during the original Lunar Landing, everyone would've died? It only takes 50 rads to kill a person, and even with the latest advance in medicine which helps alleviate the radiation problem, 50 rads is a very small number. Not to mention that space also wrecks havoc on the immune system, which obviously nobody is too keen on publicizing.

      Until we have a good solution for the aforementioned problems, human space mission should not be considered.

    3. Re:Its sad by crymeph0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Did you know that a rogue wave [wikipedia.org] can strike without warning, rapidly sinking an ocean-going vessel and killing everybody on it?

      rogue wave doesn't accumulate inside the body and does permanent and irreparable damage like radiation.

      FleaPlus' point was that people can die either way. Are you saying the problem isn't that people can die, but how they might die, e.g. cancer versus drowning? That seems like a choice better left to the individual who wants to be an astronaut, not to society.

      --
      It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
    4. Re:Its sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      fourth, to our knowledge we are the only team who's even trying to achieve the goal within the stated prize money. everyone else is doing it for the publicity, especially the CMU team. You can't say that any team spending more than the given prize money is doing it purely for publicity. They wouldn't get any funding then. No, there has to be a business plan and Astrobotic clearly has one.

      4.1 - I wonder where does the CMU team's student's stipend come? research grants? university? or they truly do all their work AFTER they fulfilled their obligatory research. Student projects are not funded at all. If they are, it was because the student applied for a grant in the school research program. They work as students in a graduate level class dedicating their own time to it. Of course, this class isn't restricted to just graduates. There are even freshman involved in the projects.
    5. Re:Its sad by tenco · · Score: 2, Interesting
      According to wikipedia, solar flares release mostly protons in a so called proton storm. Dunno what "rads" (in only know radians) are, but they seem to be an old unit for absorbed radiation dose, like Gray. 50 rads would be 0.5 Gy, then. Using a quality factor of 5 for protons with energy > 5 MeV this should equate to a dose equivalent of 2.5 Sv -> radiation poisoning exposure level. Well, certainly not good. But also certainly not "everyone would've died".

      And after all this guesswork I found this: Sickening Solar Flares

  2. non-compete? by bsDaemon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know if NASA people have to sign any sort of non-compete (I did to intern at the DOE a few years ago, so they might), but otherwise I would assume that a team of engineers that has done something like this before -- for instance, one of the Mars rover teams, would start their own team and be done with this.

    Have none of them thought of it, or are they not allowed to? Perhaps a reader from JPL might tell us? I know there are a few from comments in the Phoenix thread the other day.

    1. Re:non-compete? by evangellydonut · · Score: 2, Interesting

      only people not allowed to work on it are the direct family of the X-Prize foundation.

      As mentioned in one of the replies, to perform this kind of mission requires a significant amount of investment. the restriction comes from the source of that investment, no more than 10% can come from government sources.

      If you look over the bios of SCSG, their members are (almost) all experienced in space-specific design, and understand the cost and difficulties involved. Even a highly funded team probably don't realize that just because something is claimed to be "space qualified" doesn't mean you can actually use it in space.

    2. Re:non-compete? by evangellydonut · · Score: 2, Interesting

      almost every part that's more complex than a transistor, when applied with "space qualified" label, can easily cost $10k, and the cheapest transponder cost $500k, and the cheapest launch vehicle we know and available today cost something like $20m, once you factor in salary, it's pretty each to get beyond that $100m mark. For the purpose of this competition, we can cut some corners, not take any salary, but we do have to launch something that has a prayer's chance of working, somehow -_-