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2 Companies Win NASA's Moon-Landing Prize Money
coondoggie writes "NASA said it will this week award $1.65 million in prize money to a pair of aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again. NASA's Centennial Challenges program, which was managed by the X Prize Foundation, will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace for successfully completing the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge."
1M + 0.5M = 1.65M !
woot! I've been cheering for Armadillo for a long time, hopefully we can prevent the first strogg attack if they can gain pace and get the number 1 spot soon.
The real key to successfully land the lander is to understand that you need to apply enough thrust to slow your descent without actually reversing the velocity of the craft. If you can balance that action so that you end up only a couple pixels off the ground, you can safely put the lander down on any flat surface.
The other problem is to navigate to a flat surface, but that is also easily solved by pressing the left and right arrow keys.
As for actual controls, I prefer using the spacebar to activate the rockets, although some people like the down arrow key.
I am not surprised at Armadillo's success. John Carmak has been making mars simulators since the early 90s.
The Moon's gravity is 1/6th that of the Earth's; that's low, but is by no means "more or less zero".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Wow, so in 10 years Armadillo went from a rocket club with a bunch of guys launching hobby motors in fields to building moon landers?
D
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"if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G."
'Cause everyone knows the moon has no gravitational pull...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2009/10/30/armadillos-mccormack-robbed-ngllc-judges/
The other team had a whole extra day to improve their results that Armadillo did not. This is totally and blatantly unfair, and he has every right to be pissed.
Garbage like this will dissuade other teams from entering, no doubt.
I had a programable HP calculator. I believe it was a HP-41C. That had a lander program where you needed to enter figures to determine your decent onto the moon.
That was many, many years ago. So can I now get the money for wasting so much time on it?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The team that ended up 'beating' Armadillo's accuracy was given an extra day of flights. This didn't make John Carmack or many others very happy. At the same time, people are more upset with what appears to be arbitrary judging than competition. I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team. In fact, during previous attempts this happened with RR and AA.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
With the hours I've spent on it, I'm pretty overqualified to do the demo if they need me.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G.
FYI, this wasn't a simulation in the sense of a computer simulation, but rather in the sense that they were not actually required to perform this test on the moon. As far as I can tell from TFA, the only thing "simulated" was the Level 2 landing site which instead of a flat landing pad was a rocky surface designed to "simulate" the surface of the moon.
So, these were real rockets that were really taking off, traveling horizontally, and landing vertically. Yes gravity would be lower on the moon (not zero) and that could certainly introduce some kinds but I think this is still a worthwhile demonstration of working technology.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sometimes people confuse it not having enough gravitational pull to help us achieve escape velocity as we jump off the top of the jungle gym or at the apex of the highest swing that could ever have possibly been done on a swing with not having gravitational pull at all. I mean, the first time I threw a rock at the moon (1985?), I assumed it just went all the way there. I never saw it come down, nor did the broken car window next door have anything to do with this story.
Finally some vindication for those in the tinfoil hats.
I see another fake Moon Shot happening! 8-)
--
Ah say, son, you're about as sharp as a bowlin' ball.
The difference is in cost. The hope is that for mere eraser shavings we can have small private companies develop the modern guidance and control software for a lander that would take traditional contractors with NASA direction much more to develop.
When someone says "we did it 50 years ago" remind them that we did it then with 3-4 times the budget, and improved computer technology only lends incremental advantages -- plus that there was some loss of institutional knowledge of vehicle development since we haven't developed anything successfully since the shuttle.
Yes unfortunately 30 years ago. We stopped doing it. And after 30 years most of the people who were involved retired. Or are near retiring. IF we kept it up we will probably be so much better at space travel. However the shuttle product made space travel a bad thing for government, to expensive and not far reaching enough. We need to get off the idea of the StarTrek reusable ship. Until we get much better at it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This will make faking lunar landings soooo much easier! Hmmm.... unless this competition was faked, too! Quick, where's my tinfoil hat?
It seems to me that the point of these exercises is to get the civilian programs up to speed and with their own technology.
If a civilian company can duplicate or even best NASA at these "rudimentary" tasks, said company may be in a better position to be entirely self dependent.
If we can encourage these companies to "reinvent the wheel" now, they will be in a really good position to _not_ need NASA as a crutch on issues in the future.
Teaching a man to fish vs giving a man a fish..
Good thing you posted Anon. Don't want anyone to know the name of the idiot posting this shit.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Yes, and unfortunately the contractors building spacecraft for NASA now are the same ones who built them in the 60s. Competition, in general, spurs innovation and makes things cheaper, and pushing the growth of new startups in the industry would, at the bare minimum, bring new ideas to the fore. Ideally I'm sure the goal is to get private companies more involved in launching and exploration. There are very few around currently, and most of them are still only in the developmental stages. NASA wins by both creating competition, and taking workload off of their own engineers. It also gives incentive for these companies to develop tech on their own, before government budgets come into play.
Man, he was robbed...
http://gizmodo.com/5393626/ataris-lunar-lander-made-real
ceci n'est pas un sig
Not to be a negative nancy, but didn't we *actually* do this like 50 years ago?
What's next, a $1 million prize to the first company that can build a hydrogen bomb, construct a MOSFET (or something else the government did 50 years ago).
NASA used a lunar lander (which was developed by a private contractor) roughly 40 not 50 years ago. Bell Labs not government developed the MOSFET. And unlike lunar landers, we still have operable hydrogen bombs and MOSFETs today.
It just seems sad that we are still at this point, 50 years later.
Well, things didn't work out. If we want to get back to the point we were 35-40 years ago, we have to redevelop the technology.
close enough, we still need to build them here where there is gravity, bring it there where there is none and have it do what it was designed to do at like you said at 1/6th of earths gravity.
1/6th of Earth's gravity is far from no gravity. And if you're in no gravity then you're not in 1/6th gravity.
What's next, a $1 million prize to the first company that can ... construct a MOSFET (or something else the government did 50 years ago).
Exactly whom do you think constructs mosfets? Wisconsin Department of Transportation? USDA? BATF?
Now if the offered a $1M prize for the first mosfet that switches 200 KW yet fits in a SOT-23 package (surface mount, about one by three millimeters) for like electric cars and stuff, that would be interesting ...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, technically it's "less zero", as in not as zero as zero...
-Space for rent
http://xkcd.com/394/
Until 10 years ago, Rockets were the domain of NASA, it's billionaire contractors, and freckle-faced kids. Not you've got people from all kinds of backgrounds excited and building new designs, trying new things, and raising a new generation of inventors, engineers, and students.
That's the point of these contests - more rocket scientists, tech, and healthy innovation.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
If they were giving out extra free days last year Armadillo probably would have got 100% of the money a year ago! The judges should have taken this in to account, bonus points for accuracy? Sure, but they should lose a place just for having to try a 4th time. Fair would be armadillo gets $1.5m, being 'nice' would be $1m to armadillo and .5 to Masten. But the other way around is just totally bogus.
Armadillo definitely deserved the full million. IMHO...
When I saw the title of the post, I thought the companies would be Industrial Light & Magic and Apogee.
Armadillo was robbed; Armadillo were first by MONTHS, succeeded in their allotted window in two sequential flight attempts and their craft never caught fire unlike Masten's.
Talk about destroying incentive. This is yet another illustration of the endemic incompetence at NASA. They could not organize a piss-up in a brewery.
"Blatantly unfair" ... hmm... I take it you don't work in the business world? :-)
I agree it doesn't sound right but then lots of people on slashdot shout that NASA should behave more like a business concern and less like a bloated government department... being totally and blatantly unfair when it suits them to get the results they want is a good way towards operating like many major corporations...
How do we get better at it if we don't practice, make mistakes, make surprising discoveries about what works right although we never expected it to?
We'll never learn anything if we don't try.
However, we're not really going to leave our solar system any time soon for any useful reason until we can break some things we consider 'laws of physics'. Space is just too big and it'll take too long to do anything useful. It takes too long to do anything useful other than what we can manage in orbit already. The moon is barely acceptable. Mars is a long shot and is basically a suicide mission that may but dumb luck get back home at this point. We're going to try anyway, cause thats what we do.
In the words of Brad Cooper or Wright (writers of Stargate) spoken through Jack Oneill, 'We are a curious race, we're out there now, we can use all the help we can get'
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Unless you're an Apple user, in which case it's "closet minded".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Apparently since doing their lunar lander run Armadillo Aerospace has been keeping itself busy with "boosted hops," where they fire the rocket up to a certain altitude, and then land back down under the rocket's own power. Here's a neat video of them boosting up to ~1000 feet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYk9uGrAqn8
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=16628
Starting with lower altitudes, each time they run they're going for an incrementally higher altitude. They've gone up to about 1932 feet (589m) so far, with the plan to go all the way up to 6000 feet, which is the highest their FAA permit allows them to currently launch. I believe both Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have a number of customers in the scientific community who want to use these sorts of controlled boosted hops for running things like microgravity experiments.
Invention isn't linear. We don't actually have to be building spaceplanes in order to improve the technology required for spaceplanes.
The atmospheric portion of any spaceflight involves the same techniques as atmospheric flight in general- improving the technologies for regular flight helps with spaceflight.
The space-based portion of spaceflight involves the same techniques, regardless of whether your craft is reusable. Getting better at spaceflight in general will mean we're better at reusable spaceflight.
Spaceplanes are made of stuff. Improvements in materials and components, in all their various unrelated fields and industries, will help improve your potential spaceplane. Better computers, better fuel mixes, better launch mechanisms- you name it, you can improve it.
We don't actually need to be mucking around in woefully inadequate spaceplanes for the sake of some distant potential awesome reusable spacecraft. When we're ready to build a decent one, a decent one will definitely get built.
In the mean time, can we just use spacecraft which are actually useful?
Ships can, and should be reusable. In deep space. The solution is to decouple deep space travel and launch - when you're launching the ship you need multistage and some other tricks to escape the gravity well. But when you're in space you can use the same ship to travel to Mars and back twice, with only a refueling stop, since it takes rather little energy to propel yourself once you're out of Earth's gravity.
I was wondering the same thing. Didn't NASA do this like six times in the 60's and 70's? Why offer a prize to do something they already know how to do?
Unless they haven't actually done it before... *puts on tinfoil hat*
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Significantly, in terms of Delta-v expended by the design of this demonstration, these vehicles have proven that they would be capable of landing on the Moon from lunar orbit... which was sort of the point of the test.
The only thing missing from this demonstration is a removal of the GPS devices that were used for stabilization and navigation. In some ways, it would be very hard to pull off a demonstration without those navigation aids... as the FAA has specific "Earth" requirements that have to be met for vehicles flying in American airspace that don't apply on the Moon.
I would love to see a "level 3" competition for this challenge that would be even more realistic or even have the vehicles landing on the Moon.... assuming that the organization met the qualifications for the level 1 and 2 requirements first.
The funny statement by Armadillo was that they had even suggested that they had the materials and even the regulatory paperwork near completion to perform the level 2 qualification using a manned vehicle. Now that would be interesting to see.