X Prize $30 Million Robot Race To the Moon Is On

coondoggie writes "The master competition masters at X Prize Foundation are at it again. Today the group announced the 29 international teams that will compete for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the competition to put a robot on the moon by 2015. To win the money, a privately-funded team must successfully place a robot on the Moon's surface that explores at least 500 meters and transmits high definition video and images back to Earth. The first team to do so will claim a $20 million Grand Prize, while the second team will earn $5 million."

Comments

Push it further.

[DigiShaman]

Ya ya, I know. But it sure would lead a thunderous applause if man landed on the moon (again) to hand deliver the robot onto the lunar surface. I mean, that would just be epic!

Re:Push it further.

[guybrush3pwood]

Hehe... yeah, that'd be cool. It'd be even cooler if the robot stayed there for 20 years. It'd be uber cool if the guy stayed 20 years.

Re:Push it further.

[guybrush3pwood]

We need a Big Brother Moon Edition. Those fuckers are dead weight here on Earth anyway...

Re:Push it further.

[mdielmann]

Except it's not a re-enactment, it's a re-attainment. I'm hard pressed to think of another milestone like this that we've achieved, and then lost the capability to repeat. That's amazing and disappointing to me.

Prize is not intended to fund the effort

[tm2b]

Cue comments about $20 Mil not paying the bill.

The prize is not intended to entirely pay for the effort, it is intended to lower the cost and provide a base level of return as well as publicize the effort. The X-Prize to "space" did not pay nearly enough to pay Rutan's costs, and people don't work at getting a Nobel for the cash prize.

Re:Prize is not intended to fund the effort

[DNS-and-BIND]

Nobel prizes are not given for accomplishments. They are a call to action, and a reward for effort and initiative. [citation needed], you say?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

Oslo, October 9, 2009

Re:Prize is not intended to fund the effort

[BZ]

Look, everyone understands the Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. Many people/organizations who get it really deserve it. But laureates have also included Al Gore, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, the UN, UNHCR, and a few other questionables (your list of questionables may obviously differ from mine). Obama's case is more glaring than most of those because for the most part the laureates had done things (even if what they did was to kill lots of people and then stop)....

But you're tarring with a broad brush if you think that all the Nobel prizes work the way Peace does. The difference is in who's doing the awarding. The Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Literature Nobels are awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences (which hands out physics and chemistry), the Karolinska Institute (a medical university), and the Swedish Academy (which consists of people who actually deal with language for a living).

In all four of those cases, the prize-awarding body selects a small committee to propose laureates, then take a vote in a much bigger group (the full membership for the two academies and a 50-person group appointed for the purpose at the Karolinska Institute.

For peace, on the other hand, the selection is done entirely by the 5 members of the committee, who are not in the business of "peace" themselves but are effectively political appointees (appointed by the Norwegian Parliament).

So the peace prize process is really sort of set up to fail to start with, compared to the other four.... It's a pleasant surprise that it doesn't fail more often than it actually does.

Re:Prize is not intended to fund the effort

[tm2b]

As most people were able to understand, I was speaking of the scientific Nobel prizes and not the political ones. Einstein did not win the Nobel prize as a call to action in his work on the photoelectric effect, but for his achievement.

Re:Prize is not intended to fund the effort

[h4rm0ny]

They gave a Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. If that's not evidence of a sense of humour, nothing is.

And the awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama was widely criticized as devaluing it. He was awarded it for saying that he was going to engage in more conciliatory international relations. Awarding politicians for what they promise to do is a bad, bad idea, imo.

Unfortunately,

[publiclurker]

not only are many of the parts no longer on the shelf, but nobody even remembers how to make some of them anymore.

Re:Unfortunately,

[mrsquid0]

No, it is not that hard to put something on the Moon. We have the parts, and we know how to make them. We can soft-land rovers on Mars, and the Moon is a lot easier to get to and easier to land something on than Mars is. The problem is not the technology, that is essentially a solved problem. The problem is doing it cheaply.

Re:Unfortunately,

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think an iPhone is going to work very well on the Moon. It barely works in New York City.

Re:Unfortunately,

[MacGyver2210]

It is in no way easier to land on the moon than on Mars. There is an atmosphere on Mars, albeit not a life-supporting one, which allows for the use of parachutes and non-vacuum equipment.

The moon does not have the same benefit, and therefore all forces generated throughout all of landing and maneuvering must be created with thrusters of some sort. It also exposes the equipment sent there to some serious temperatures, constant vacuum, and some really really nasty dust. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the difference in gravity would make it harder as well.

Re:Only $30 million?

[whereiswaldo]

This is no time to joke. And stop calling me Shirley.

The Mythbusters should try to win this!

[Joe The Dragon]

The Mythbusters should try to win this!

Re:The Mythbusters should try to win this!

[Verloc]

Masters of cinematic effects != rocket scientists.

Re:The Mythbusters should try to win this!

[0100010001010011]

But bad rocket science = masterful cinematic effects.

Re:The Mythbusters should try to win this!

[macshit]

"Well Bob, it looks like our calculations were completely wrong, and our lander's going to impact at incredible speed, resulting in a giant explosion!

We are rocket scientists: MYTH BUSTED!
...
Good thing we've got that camera crew in lunar orbit ready to capture it in ultra slow motion..."

Space Robot Fight?

[Stregano]

I would personally put some kind of weapon on my robot in the case the other robots got there first. Send a signal back to earth of my robot kicking your robot's ass. That would be badass

Lunar Lander

[mrbcs]

Please, please, please, would the winner send back a hi def photo of some of the Nasa junk left there. This would end all tinfoil hat theories on whether Nasa actually went there.

Re:Lunar Lander

[nzap]

What's to stop people from claiming the robot landing was faked?

Re:Is that enough money?

[Teancum]

The real news of the day isn't the contest itself, which has been discussed elsewhere including on Slashdot previously. The big deal is that a contract for a flight to the Moon has been inked and a launch slot set aside to put the vehicle up there.

I don't know how much this particular group is going to be making in terms of a profit, but they got their rocket and have some serious money behind them in terms of helping to finance this trip. This particular team is also the one to beat, or at least a top contender as well. I'm sure that over the next few months that several other teams are going to be announcing flight schedules too.

The low-cost launcher to watch for that might turn a "profit" is ARCA who has already launched a vehicle and has a rather unique approach for orbital spaceflight. Stuff is happening and money is being spent, so this is a good question to ask.

I'll put up $100

[adenied]

It's official. I'll put up $100, but only if your robit looks like Bender and is powered by cheap bourbon. Sabotaging your competitors earns a 10% bonus.

It was all a fake

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

So, to claim the $20 million, all I have to do is drive my robot out to an abandoned warehouse in Arizona, let it drive around and take a picture of one of the LEMs (they left them in the warehouse, didn't they?) and then publish the picture?

SCORE!

Re:Once again science get crap funding

[AsmCoder8088]

Not to mention, it's not $100 million, it's actually $3 million...

Seems like anytime you get into the millions, people seem to stop caring about how accurate their numbers are in an argument

X-Prize's one off events.

[FatLittleMonkey]

It's a shame that the X-Prize donors only fund single prizes. It would vastly increase the rate of technological development if they were regular contests.

Compare DARPA's robot car challenge (now Urban Challenge) to X-Prize's original $10m sub-orbital prize. The first year, no team even qualified for the DARPA prize. Hell no team completed more than a fraction of the course. The following year, most teams completed a more difficult course, and half of them qualified (finished in under 10hrs). A few years later, the things are running traffic in urban obstacle courses.

Meanwhile, you have the suborbital X-Prize. After 9 years with no attempts, Burt Rutan's team met the minimum requirements for the X-Prize. And no one has ever done it since, including Rutan. Imagine how much suborbital rockets would have improved by now if it had been an annual highest-flight-wins event.

And imagine if the Lunar Prize was... well, let's say, a quadrennial event. A prize awarded every four years for the longest rover trek on the moon. A Paris Dakar Rally on the moon.

DARPA had the right idea, the X-Prize donors don't.

Re:Is that enough money?

[tibit]

xkcd would disagree. It seems that getting to the LEO (Shuttle/ISS altitude) seems to get you about 1/6th of the way there, in terms of energy expenditure. Going back is much easier, of course -- about 20x so.

Re:Once again science get crap funding

[Vectormatic]

now there is an idea

X-prize lunar landing control center transcript
*beginning lunar decent*
*30k feet to go, firing retro rockets*
*20k feet to go, retro rockets to full thrust*
*10k feet to go decent velocity at 100 feet/second*
*1000 feet to go, beginning final decent, scouting for landing spot*
*500 feet to go, and we'll be right back after a message from our sponsors*

COCA COLA, IT EVEN TASTES GOOD ON THE MOON!!!

Re:Once again science get crap funding

[Teancum]

Between the pre-game shows, the post-game show, and the sum total of nearly all of commercials combined, I'm sure that Fox Television pulled in at least a revenue of over $100 million for what was just a one day event. Comparisons between that the costs for spaceflight are interesting to say the least.

Most people are more interested in watching football than watching some guy play golf on the Moon, so it should be obvious where the money is going. It turns out that spaceflight is more expensive than even putting on a spectacle like the Super Bowl too.

Re:Once again science get crap funding

[Vectormatic]

there is a difference for me between having a coke symbol on the side of the rocket, and interrupting the show right at the moment supreme for commercials

the former i wouldnt mind, hell, i enjoy all sorts of motorsports, and actually think all the sponsor logo's add a lot of visual flair to the cars, but commercial breaks, i hate them with a passion

Re:With old tech not new :(

[Chris Burke]

I actually looked EMDrive up and read one of their recent papers, and at first it didn't seem that wacky, at least not in the violates-conservation-laws way I was expecting. I mean it's basically just a photon drive. There's nothing reality-warping about using an electromagnetic field to carry momentum away, and thus propel you forward. And they do indeed have the advantage that they don't need reaction mass.

Then I read that they intend to use these things to lift vehicles out of earth's orbit. Okay now that's just crazy talk. Photons are the worst case scenario for energy vs momentum. A laser powerful enough to bore a hole into the earth isn't going to so much as make the laser itself bounce a little. Photon drives are for efficiently maneuvering around the solar system or inter-stellar space, not escaping the surface of a planet!

Ah well. Is it a sign of progress when the hacks/frauds/loons (whichever the case may be) at least respect the basic laws of physics?