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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 !
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.
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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John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Less is more.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Finally some vindication for those in the tinfoil hats.
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.
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.
Armadillo completed the challenge several months ago, but their landing accuracy was slightly worse than Masten's attempt. Masten completed the challenge only one day before the expiration of the contest, and was able to do it only because another competitor failed and the X prize foundation allowed Masten to use their launch window (they'd earlier used up their scheduled time slots without doing a successful flight). Armadillo didn't have time or launch permits to go back and improve their accuracy.
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Not only that. Carmack's vehicle was bigger and thus closer to the real thing, and more difficult to handle. However the control was so accurate that the vehicle hardly oscillated or rotated at all. Much better than Masten's vehicle - even an amateur like me could see it.
IMO Carmack should get the 1st prize. Mastens did also very good job, and would deserve the 1st prize, if Carmack's vehicle were absent.
"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'
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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.