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."

Comments

It's all about timing and thrust vectors

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Other private space companies are Doomed.

[xxuserxx]

I am not surprised at Armadillo's success. John Carmak has been making mars simulators since the early 90s.

Carmack was robbed

[HEbGb]

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.

It ended in some amount of controversy

[malakai]

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.

I don't think anyone is going to be surprised that I am unhappy about
Masten getting a fourth shot at the level 2 prize. I understand that
there is a desire to award all the prize money this year and be able
to close the books on the LLC, but I don't think it is fair. If you
can just call an abort each day, you can keep anyone else from
flying. Three swings, three misses, time's up.

John Carmack

For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real
shot at completing the level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our
landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the
competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy. If
they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit
of a sheepish mea culpa. Nobody to be upset at except myself. We could
have probably made a second flight in the drizzle on our scheduled days,
and once we had the roll thruster issue sorted out, our landing accuracy
would have been in the 20cm range. I never thought it was worth
investing in differential RTK GPS systems, because it has no bearing on
our commercial operations.

The current situation, where Masten was allowed a third active day of
competition, after trying and failing on both scheduled days, is
different. I don't hold anything against Masten for using an additional
time window that has been offered, since we wouldn't have passed it up
if we were in their situation, but I do think this was a mistake on the
judges part.

I recognize that it is in the best interests of both the NASA Centennial
Challenges department and the X-Prize Foundation to award all the prize
money this year, and that will likely have indirect benefits for us all
in coming years. It is probably also beneficial to the nascent New
Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have
other resources to draw upon. Permit me to be petty enough to be upset
and bitter about a half million dollars being taken from me and given to
my competitor.

The rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything
up to and including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it
necessary, so there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do
feel that we have been robbed. I was going to argue that if Masten was
allowed to take a window on an unscheduled day with no notice, the
judges should come back to Texas on Sunday and let us take our unused
second window to try for a better accuracy, but our FAA waiver for the
LLC vehicle was only valid for the weekend of our scheduled attempt.

John Carmack

Re:It ended in some amount of controversy

[njvack]

I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team.

And indeed, after Masten's third attempt, their rocket was damaged badly enough by a fire that they really thought they wouldn't be able to fly the next day, regardless of the judges' decision. It was the help of volunteers from other competing teams that got them off the ground the next day. In addition to fixing the problem that caused the fire, they essentially needed to replace all the wiring on the rocket.

And the next day, a bunch of Masten's team members drove up to FAR and helped Unreasonable Rocket to troubleshoot their rockets -- even though success by Unreasonable could only cost them prize money.

The members of these teams are not only ridiculously talented, they're also ridiculously open and supportive of each other. It's a bit humbling to watch.

Re:It ended in some amount of controversy

[cowscows]

Yeah, but it sounds like Carmack's argument is that he thinks that he could do even better yet again if they had an extra flight. Which makes sense, every time you do a test flight, you learn something, and so that should make your next flight even better. Take this further, and if your ultimate goal is to get the best possible design, then the contest should never end, because there's always room for improvement.

But in reality, when you create a contest, you have to have rules and you have to have a deadline. Bending the rules for one team but not the others is generally unfair. The extra day most certainly did help, because apparently their craft was unable to fly on its three "regulation" attempts.

Re:its NASA!!!

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:humm

[AmigaHeretic]

>>It's almost as easy to click the link and RTFA as it is to complain about the summary...

Holy crap there are links to articles in the summaries?!?

Re:armadillo placed second!

[cyberthanasis12]

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.