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First 10 Teams in $30M Google Lunar X Prize Announced

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Feb 22, 2008 03:17 PM
from the go-for-the-green dept.
Space Science
coondoggie writes to mention that the first ten teams racing for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize have been announced. The competitors will try to be the first team to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon capable of traveling at least 1,600 feet and returning video, images, and data. The teams include Romanian-based ARCA, Italy-based Team Italia, and several different teams from around the US, many of which competed in the Ansari X Prize.
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Submission: X Prize, Google set on 10 teams in $30M moon race by coondoggie (973519)
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First 10 Teams in $30M Google Lunar X Prize Announced 50 Comments More /

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  • Oh no! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2008, @03:20PM (#22519754)
    Romulans are competing!

  • Much better challenge (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HEbGb (6544) on Friday February 22 2008, @03:22PM (#22519770)
    This is a much better challenge than the X-prize, which didn't even include orbit. It was amusing to watch, but really not a huge deal imo.

    I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission, even if someone does end up winning the prize.

    • Re:Much better challenge (Score:5, Insightful)

      by moderatorrater (1095745) on Friday February 22 2008, @03:27PM (#22519846)
      And the original X-prize wasn't enough to cover the budget for developing the tools for a private venture to get into space either. $30 million should be enough to get to the moon once you have the equipment, and it might even be enough to cover the equipment, but it sure won't cover the development of the equipment. Like the X-prize, this is more of a rebate so that companies can expect to get some money back on a venture that's going to earn them a lot of money from other sources.

      $30 million is also a good excuse for rich people to compete.

        • what exactly is going to happen again when the shuttle retires? There is no clear cut plan, also sad
          Soyuz and Orion?

        • Re:Much better challenge (Score:4, Informative)

          by Wilbasa1 (1244598) on Friday February 22 2008, @07:13PM (#22522752)
          Actually, that's basically exactly what they have: a $20M first place, $5M second place, and $5M in bonuses. Another $2M bonus was just added to the competition if you launch out of the state of Florida.

    • I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission, even if someone does end up winning the prize.
      If they got the same guys in who designed the 2012 Olympic logo, I'd say this fully buzzword compliant poster [regmedia.co.uk] probably cost that much alone. Moon 2.0; Cheese Edition?
    • None of the multi-million dollar prizes are enough to cover the budget of any of these attempts, whether it be the Ansari X-prize or Google's "shoot the moon".

      The real prize is the prestige of winning it, or even just competing. The actual monetary prize is just a token.
      • Its true. The 30 mil is just so that everyone can look at one another and say "IT'S ON, BITCHES!"
      • I don't know, 30 million will buy a lot of 2-liter soda bottles and one hell of an air compressor. I better go call that Canadian guy.

    • maybe not (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Quadraginta (902985) on Friday February 22 2008, @03:53PM (#22520208)
      The X Prize and this competition differ from competitions early in the aviation era, to which they're routinely compared, in that they aren't for doing something no one's ever done before. Suborbital flight was achieved in the 1960s, both by NASA and by the Air Force with the X-15 program. Landing on the Moon and sending back photos was achieved by the Soviets and Americans in the mid 1960s.

      What presumably is the point to these new prizes is not the achievement per se, which merely duplicates something done forty years ago, but the goal of doing so much more cheaply, and with the ability to do it much more routinely. Those are reasonable goals: after all, the principal failure of the Space Shuttle is that it can't be launched nearly as often and easily as it was supposed to be. If it had eventually been able to fly 20 times a year to LEO on a routine basis, which was what was promised in the 80s, and which would've brought its per-flight cost down to an extremely modest $60-100 million, we would be now hailing its unqualified success.

      So I think the virtue of the X Prize was not its goal of suborbital flight per se, but the goal of suborbital flight with the same craft twice in a short period (a week, as I recall). Doing it rapidly is at least proof of concept evidence that you've found a way to do it cheaply and routinely. And I'm disappointed that this new competition doesn't seem to have that element. I'm not sure how it could. Maybe they would have been better off going for a similar X Prize competition for actual orbital flight, e.g. can you fly to orbit twice in the same week. That would be a real achievement.

      I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission

      It's a totally token amount. Merely launching a geostationary satellite on an Ariane 5 rocket costs over $100 million. Presumably if you compete seriously you're in it for the glory.
      • It's projected to be $35 for the lightest fare on a falcon9 [spacex.com] and that is just to orbit. Still, the prize won't cover the fare.
      • Suborbital flight was achieved in the 1960s, both by NASA and by the Air Force with the X-15 program.

        Calling the X-15 (mach 7 or so, 4K mph) suborbital is really a stretch. A few of the pilots got astronaut wings from it, but that doesn't make it much more suborbital than SR-71 pilots. The Nazi WW II V-2 was more suborbital than the X-15, and that was 1942.

        You also ought to mention the Soviets, who were orbital before the US was suborbital.
        • 107 km up [wikipedia.org] is much higher than what the sr-71 can reach (about 25km [wikipedia.org]), or any air-breathing craft for that matter. BTW, the original X-prize was for an altitude of 100km.
          Maybe you are confusing speed with altitude. You could have orbital velocity at ground level, that wouldn't make the craft an orbiter. To reach orbit or sub-orbit may require a certain speed (physics and all that) but it's not the principal definition, the trajectory is.
        • No I don't think so. The X-15 reached an altitude of 67 miles, which is "suborbital" according to the X Prize criteria, and about as good as Scaled's SpaceShipOne achieved. The SR-71 never reached those altitudes, IIRC, although it set altitude records for horizontal flight (about 80,000 feet I believe). Since the SR-71 is air-breathing and the X-15 is not, this is not surprising.

          The V-2 doesn't qualify at all, because it didn't carry passengers.

          I probably should have mentioned the Soviets, except that I
          • My point was that calling the X-15 suborbital is a real stretch. No one at Scaled or even the X-prize people has called their prize for suborbital flight, as I understand it, only to reach the 100 km limit which defines outer space and astronaut status. Maybe you are confusing altitude and horizontal speed.

            The V-2 qualifies for everything except the X prize. "Suborbital" certainly doesn't care whether it has passengers aboard. ICBMS are suborbital, far more than the X-15 or any X-prize contender.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by Quadraginta (902985)
              Well, this sounds rather nitpicky. You can't define "suborbital" flight only in terms of velocity, either, or rocket sleds and railgun projectiles would qualify. Is it even interesting?

              I suggest the natural understanding of "suborbital" flight is flight which goes very high, pretty much out of the atmosphere, but which isn't up to orbital velocity. By that definition the X-15 qualifies, and so does SS1. The SR-71 does not, and as an air-breather is really in an entirely different category.

              Any IRBM or IC
        • I don't think so. The payload of the Ariane 5 is 15,000 pounds. If your argument were true, then you should be able to launch 1 pound into geostationary orbit for 1/15000 of the cost of an Ariane 5 launch, or about $6700. Obviously you can't.

          There's a basic cost to a launch that includes building a big thingy full of explosive fuel, maintaining a safe place to launch it, hiring all the trained people you need to oversee everything, filling in the government forms, paying for radar and radio operators and
          • For that reason any launch to orbit will cost at least $30-50 million, and the most expensive ride to orbit -- currently the Space Shuttle -- comes in at about $500 million. That is not all that large a range, and suggests launch costs are not totally dominated by the size of what's launched.

            Some folks have been speculating [spacefellowship.com] that it might be possible to use a $6 million SpaceX Falcon 1 [wikipedia.org] to get 213kg of mass to the moon. Of course, you still have to worry about landing that mass and the rover itself, which may
            • Boy I dunno. They're talking as if the cost of the vehicle for trans-lunar injection and lunar orbit insertion, not to mention the lunar descent vehicle, and the rover itself, are all minor pieces of the cost and can be funded from the loose change left over after you buy a Falcon.

              That seems unrealistic. When JPL designs and builds rovers for NASA, they typically spend $100 million or so. I mean, when you design something that has to do stuff while being incredibly tiny to save on launch weight, it ends
            • Hmmm, the Wikipedia article on the Pegasus XL says the typical launch cost is $30 million.

              $40 million doesn't buy you a "massive" rocket any more. You need to multiply by 2 to 4 just for something that can park a few tons in LEO or geostationary orbit. And even that doesn't really qualify as a "massive" rocket by, say, Saturn V standards.

              It's all about delta-V and mass fractions.

              I don't think so. That was part of the thinking behind the Space Shuttle, why it was designed as a combination heavy-lift vehic

    • This is a much better challenge than the X-prize, which didn't even include orbit. It was amusing to watch, but really not a huge deal imo.
      The original X-prize for space was, on the other hand, for a manned spacecraft. That's a pretty big distinction you should draw if you want to compare & contrast the coolness of X-prize vs. Lunar X-prize.

    • This is a much better challenge than the X-prize, which didn't even include orbit. It was amusing to watch, but really not a huge deal imo.

      In your opinion. As I see it, it's opened the way for not only more prizes, but also substantial development of space tourism. We'll see if the current effort lasts, but as I see it, there's a good chance that the X-Prize marks the start of real space development and exploration.

    • Ok, but it is quite a bit to SUBSIDIZE such a mission. I think that's the idea. Dear Company-who-was-already-interested-in-this, if you step up your game, we'll pay for $30m of the project.
    • Both of them do not have the required infrastructure to make it happen TODAY. It will require in general low cost. But it will drive companies to compete and make this. From a posting that I did last night concerning this:
      Most no-one thinks the Google Lunar X-Prize will be won.. and that's just soft-landing a rover on the Moon by 2015. [slashdot.org]
      Hummmm. Everybody swore that America's space prize was un-winnable. And yet, I think that Musk will win it, with the remote possibility that several others could still do
      • Hummmm. Everybody swore that America's space prize was un-winnable. And yet, I think that Musk will win it, with the remote possibility that several others could still do it.

        I'm sure Musk's Dragon [wikipedia.org] has the technical capability to win the prize, but I think they might not qualify due to the government funding SpaceX has received from NASA COTS. Of course, regardless of the prize, I'm sure Musk is eying Bigelow's private space stations as a large potential market for his spacecraft.

        My prediction: Musk wins the

    • Re:Much better challenge (Score:5, Informative)

      by deopmix (965178) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:29PM (#22522340)
      My senior design project is to design a mission from the ground up that could potentially compete in the competition. Our preliminary budgets are coming in around $20-30 million, so it's not impossible to do it for that price. What most people don't realize is that you don't have to send a 1000 kg rover to the moon, we are looking at a mass to the moon of about 75-100 kg. This allows you to use much smaller launch vehicles which are considerably cheaper, in fact we only need to get about 800 kg to LEO which can be done for under $10 million. Additionally most of the technology is already in place to do this, so there wouldn't be a lot of development costs.

  • I'm disappointed that there's no UK team (Score:3, Funny)

    by Finallyjoined!!! (1158431) on Friday February 22 2008, @03:24PM (#22519806)
    Come on lads!

    You don't need a parachute to land on the moon, don't let the failure of that Mars thingy stop you :-)

    • Swindon is still trying to find a longer ladder..

      (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
    • Not to mention a parachute won't do you any good.

      Which makes me realize that with todays technology, if we ever land a man on a planet large enough to sustain an earth-like atmosphere, the chances of ever having them return is nil.
    • The UK team are too busy doing Top Gear [youtube.com] stunts [youtube.com].

  • Well? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Eddy Luten (1166889)
    Where's John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace? I would think that these guys would jump at a chance like this since they could use some promotion after what happened last year [armadilloaerospace.com].
    • Where's John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace? I would think that these guys would jump at a chance like this since they could use some promotion after what happened last year.

      Personally, I think it'd be quite interesting to see them partner up with someone else, focusing on the lander while somebody else constructs the rover. From their FAQ:

      http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/FAQ#lunarXPrize [armadilloaerospace.com]

      Do you plan to compete in the recently-announced Google Lunar X Prize?

      We've discussed it and have considered approaches for it, but we have no firm plans at this time. We have a lot of other things to think about at the moment, and getting to the moon is further down that list.

  • They're just doing it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Trigun (685027) <evil AT evilempire DOT ath DOT cx> on Friday February 22 2008, @03:28PM (#22519872)
    to see if the U.S. really did land on the moon.
    • Actually, I think it's part of google's master plan [google.com].
      • >Our new goal is to "organize all the useful information in the universe and serve it to you on a lightly salted cracker."

        I'm in!
    • Then all US teams should be forbidden to enter cause they are likely just there to keep the hoax alive and all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by R3d M3rcury (871886)
      While this is a funny comment, it's not a horrible idea.

      First, you know the topology of the area, which I would imagine would be helpful in designing the rover and lander. You know you won't have to deal with going up big hills or anything like that.

      Second, and more mercurial, I'd imagine pictures and video of the Apollo 11 landing site would fetch a pretty penny. You could probably sell exclusive broadcast rights and such for a few extra million.
    • The "Southern California Selene Group" has the ring of what Cringely described. But I followed a few links to check it out and he's not mentioned, though it is possible that he's too minor a player to show at that level.
    • It made me wonder too. The only name which appears in Cringely's column is Tomas Svitek, whose LinkedIn profile [linkedin.com] doesn't mention anything about the X-Prize.

      Also, the part in Cringely's column which talks about him seems to be a copy/paste job from an article about "Orbital Outfitters", a "new company to provide next generation space suits" [spacefellowship.com].

      This is the spacefellowship.com version from 2006:

      Beginning with a PhD from Caltech, he was a systems engineer on the NASA Mars Scout, Mars Surveyor, Mars Sample Return an

  • Is this the first step to building Google's moon base? [google.com]

  • Join the GLXP teams (Score:4, Interesting)

    by the_kanzure (1100087) on Friday February 22 2008, @08:02PM (#22523160) Homepage
    Team FREDNET, Team Cringely, and Interplanetary Ventures are all friendly groups of people to look into. Cringely has a wiki up for his project, and FREDNET has a rover going, and Interplanetary Ventures has facebook presence. I did a link dump a few days ago, so go check out all of the teams [osaerospace.com] -- they need contributors, even web programmers willing to bootstrap the communities.

    • Re:Goal? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nyeerrmm (940927) on Friday February 22 2008, @03:47PM (#22520116)
      I'd say its two-fold. To show the possibility of privately funded interplanetary exploration, and to support the development of low cost, space-capable robotics.

      I doubt that anyone will be trying to develop their own launch vehicle to do this, although a custom trans-lunar injection stage might be in the cards. One of the upcoming Falcon 1-extended versions may have the juice to get a small but capable rover to the lunar surface, bringing this reasonably within cost restrictions.

    • Developing methods that have a low cost-per-launch? Stimulating private space travel?
      Yes. Can't have one without the other, really.
    • 1) Build robot that can be remotely controlled via a website
      2) Get it to the moon (the ????)
      3) Profit
    • For google, its probably publicity and goodwiil. Possibly a bit of profit by putting the pictures and stuff on the net. And because they hope it will be cool.

      For the competitors, prestige, experience, publicity.
    • Well, this is about sending a rover to the moon, armadillo is just building a lander, as far as I know. Not the same competition.
    • The problem is that, while raw computing power has grown exponentially since then, that doesn't mean that all of the many, advanced, technologies needed have followed suite. Things that rely on basic physics, like propulsion, may not have become that much more cost efficient. Anything that requires lots of space, equipment, etc. would still, most likely, be very expensive.

      Things that, off the top of my head, may still be on that list could be communication/tracking (large antenna arrays are expensive and st

    • I honestly think the only expensive part of the project will be the costs of fuel and contracting the production of various parts.

      Wrong. In the 60's hardware/development was the big cost, but these days it is ALWAYS insurance and covering your legal butt. That will be the biggest cost, guaranteed. If you rocket screws up and hits a metro area, well, you have to have a pretty big policy to cover that. And some good defense lawyers.

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