SoCal Selene Group Drops Google Lunar X Prize Bid

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."

Comments

Its sad

[phpmysqldev]

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.

Re:Its sad

[mrisaacs]

Anyone (with the right team and skills) can scavenge parts to build a lander - but the idea is to develop technologies and components that could be used on and reduce the cost of real missions.

Using stuff that's cheap because it's left over doesn't meet the goals.

Spending limits are also a good idea in contests of this kind - if you win, with a solution even more expensive than currently in use technologies - what have you accomplished?

This is not just a gee whiz contest, the idea is to advance the science and technology in hopes of jump starting private industry in the space arena.

Re:Its sad

[phpmysqldev]

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

Re:Its sad

[evangellydonut]

Being a former member of the team...

first, the tanks can be purchased on the open market if you know the proper vendor.

second, the tanks in question was not the first choice, was not even the second choice. it just happens that we were able to get our hands on some, and may consider using them when the stars aligned.

third, something novel WAS disallowed due to vagueness of the rule.

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.

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.

Re:Its sad

[FleaPlus]

Its sad that bureaucracy has caused an entire team to become disillusioned with the competition.

What's weird though is that in a post by the same person at the Southern California Selene Group earlier that day, instead of blaming bureaucracy she said that their reason for disillusionment was their opposition to human space missions (and the idea that the Google Lunar X Prize could support that), and their (somewhat belated) realization that the Google Lunar X Prize was intended to promote commercialization of space. I personally think they were being terribly silly, but you can read the post for yourself:

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams/scsg/blog/some-serious-thinking-at-the-southern-california-selene-group

n my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I'm an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.

The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the "real purpose" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity's future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn't help but think "what am I doing here?" When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed - no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.

Re:Its sad

[evangellydonut]

Bingo. While it's not difficult to come up with an alternative design, the fact that our initial design was dismissed so easily and without reason, makes us wonder what other disqualifications are hidden down the road.

Re:Its sad

[FleaPlus]

Did you know that if a solar flare had occurred during the original Lunar Landing, everyone would've died?

Did you know that a rogue wave can strike without warning, rapidly sinking an ocean-going vessel and killing everybody on it? It's happened many times already. Clearly, for safety's sake we must put an end to putting humans on ocean-going craft, regardless of whether or not they volunteer for it.

Re:Its sad

[Cameroon]

Exactly my thought - risky doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done. Getting out of bed in the morning sure is risky, probably should just stay inside.

I'm all for recognizing the hazards of an activity and weighing the risk/reward, but if we don't have a problem with oil riggers, Alaskan fishermen, etc. then why would we have a problem with risk for scientific and/or economic advancement in space?

Maybe holding off on tourists in space until we can come up with reasonable precautions/reactions for things like solar flares, but manned exploration by people who know and understand the risks? There are plenty of people who accept those risks for a multitude of reasons.

Re:Its sad

[crymeph0]

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.

Re:Its sad

[Mike1024]

Not having seen the rules - I don't know how vague they are - but the mission statement is pretty clear. The specific issue in the article the comes to mind was the disallowing of the scavenged fuel tanks. Draft guidelines here.

I must say, they include some weird requirements:

4.3.5 says the X Prize Foundation gets to give you a video, an e-mail, and a text message you must broadcast from the moon, and they get to specify the soundtrack for your video broadcast.
4.3.3.3 says you must take three substantially different self portraits of your rover, clearly showing the Google Lunar X Prize logo.
4.3.4.9 wants the same again at the end of the drive.
5.3.3 "The Embedded Communications Specialist or other TEAM member or members shall publish a minimum of one blog per week to an XPF-designated website or XPF-designated Blogger account. TEAMs shall also provide online streaming videos, posted to an XPF-designated website or XPF-designated YouTube account with a minimum monthly cumulative duration of 15 minutes. TEAMs shall publish a minimum of 8 discrete, substantively different videos per month, 4 of which shall have a minimum length of 30 seconds."
5.3.4.1 "TEAMs shall send representatives to appear as spokespeople, judges, or attendees for Google Lunar X PRIZE-related public education and outreach events at the request of XPF."
5.5 "Logo Placements TEAMS shall display certain Google Lunar X PRIZE logos as specified by XPF. [...] XPF reserves the right to put logos on all CRAFTs, as well as launch facilities, launch vehicles, secondary vehicles, and other relevant equipment. [...] XPF reserves 50% of available logo space on the CRAFT and all relevant vehicles.
5.11.4 "The TEAM shall make the provision of all data related to the Mooncast and fulfillment of the Google Lunar X PRIZE Mission Requirements exclusive to XPF and XPF-identified Partners."
6.3 "Competition Media Rights are the rights held by and or conveyed to XPF [...] This package shall also include an irrevocable, perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, exclusive, sublicensable right and license to XPF for all video and imagery, regardless of its inclusion in the Google Lunar X PRIZE Mission Requirements, taken from the launch site, mission control center(s), or spacecraft(s) by XPF, its Partners, or the TEAM "

With requirements like that you can see why someone might think "Hey, this competition suddenly seems less about science/engineering and more about publicity/advertising"

Re:Its sad

[tenco]

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

Effort doesn't mean it's a good idea

[RoastingHeart]

"HUH? Do they know how hard we have worked on this? " (Their Camera Design) and the denying of the "ARCA guys (who had lugged across Europe a full-scale mockup of their craft to ISU for display!)"

I could drag hot dogs through shag carpet all day to the point of exhaustion. Doesn't mean that's productive science.

non-compete?

[bsDaemon]

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.

Re:non-compete?

[bornyesterday]

I doubt NASA has a non-compete agreement, but the goal of the X-Prize is a privately funded venture. Just because a guy who worked at NASA has the knowledge to design a similar system doesn't mean that he can get the necessary money to make the prize worthwhile economically speaking.

Re:non-compete?

[evangellydonut]

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.

Re:non-compete?

[evangellydonut]

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 -_-

Unsupported Statement of the Day

[clem]

Assuredly, there are more to come. Why is this assured?

"really, really hard" to get to moon

[192939495969798999]

I know my team dropped because after reviewing the objective of getting to the moon, we concluded that it would be "really, really hard" to get there.

Re:"really, really hard" to get to moon

[evangellydonut]

I'm pretty confident in Harold and co's ability to send the payload to the moon, the question is how much would it cost. Being a team in the US, there are also significant issues with ITAR if we were to choose a foreign launcher (ie Russians or Chinese or even the Europeans). As for a US launch, Falcon 1 is too small for any team to use, Falcon 1e could be phantom hardware, or not be ready on-time, and things doesn't get better from there.

Only one comment to make

[johnlcallaway]

Waaaahhhh!!!!

The article as written makes the author look like a cry baby. Whether that is an accurate representation or not I can't tell until someone with better communication skills can provide something of substance.

You sign up for something someone else is running, you better make sure you understand everything ahead of time. If the rules are vague, get someone to clarify them first before dragging mock ups across country.

Or accept the fact they are vague and someone may make decisions you don't like but will have to live with.

Or ... take your toys and go home. Nothing prevents anyone from continuing the task on their own. I'd say if someone was really interested in doing this, they would continue. Imagine taking the wind of of the XPF sails by being able to say "That's nice. Did you see the pictures from our landing 6 months ago???"

Shut up and win

[kaptain80]

I don't buy into that mentality all the time, but... bureaucracy or not, you're participating in their prize, get used to their rules or play a different game. Shut up and win.

The number of teams is irrelevant to who wins; it's only an interesting stat for the organizers to advertise. How many teams were signed up for the first X PRIZE? Something on the order of 20, right? How many teams had a legitimate chance to win? 1.

By and large, it's a unicorn race, then someone shows up with a horse and wins. I expect roughly the same from GLXP: both (1) a low ratio of legitimate to total entrants; and (2) a really cool finish.

Selene has to drop out now? No big deal. Their unicorn wasn't ahead of the others anyway.

Re:Childish?

[evangellydonut]

There's nothing in our camera design that doesn't meet the rules. It's just that simple.

Re:Childish?

[evangellydonut]

thank you. I've spent 2 grand out of my own pocket so far, and will probably spend more if we continued on. what if by the end, after we find a sponsor who puts up all that money, and ready to launch, and have the X-Prize foundation tell us "even though your design meets all our requirements, it's not what we had in mind, thus you are disqualified", what then?