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Carnegie Mellon To Compete In Google Lunar X-Prize
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 21, 2007 08:15 AM
from the and-beyond dept.
from the and-beyond dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google's Lunar X-Prize already has a prominent entry. William Whittaker, a researcher from Carnegie Mellon University said that he will be assembling a team to develope a robot that will be be competing for the $20 million grand prize. According to a TG Daily story, Whittaker has some unfair advantages, as he previously developed a lunar rover for NASA that 'can find concentrations of hydrogen, possibly water and other volatile chemicals on the moon that could be mined to produce fuel, water and air that are essential for supporting lunar outposts.' The Lunar X-Prize runs until the end of 2012 and Carnegie Mellon's announcement could be a first indication that researchers are taking this challenge very seriously."
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What's the controversy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The purpose of the competition is to get a rover on the moon, and to encourage private space exploration. The competition is not "having space travel done by people with no experience".
Fairness (Score:3, Insightful)
Blue Origin did not compete in X Prize (Score:2)
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Why is this an unfair advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this unfair? Here is the summarized requirements from the Google Lunar X-Prize [googlelunarxprize.org] home page:
It sounds to me like Carnegie Mellon University has the right idea. There are quite a few talented rocket scientists [wikipedia.org] out there. Why not utilize them as a resource?
Hardly an advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several things to realize about this prize. First, the rover is very roughly a third of the work. I'd break into getting to LEO, getting to the lunar surface, and all the stuff on the surface (rover, video, communication, etc.).
If you're trying to do this on a budget comparable to the prize, each of those is very challenging. If you buy your orbital launch, the cheapest option is probably a SpaceX Falcon 1, which starts at $7M -- a third of your budget already. That means you get *one* attempt. This prize won't be won on the first flight of the hardware, not with a budget even approaching the $20M purse.
Getting from (Earth) orbit to the surface is tricky, but probably the easiest piece. Carmack is very close to demonstrating a large fraction of that with Pixel at the Lunar Lander Challenge in October. Left to do would be nontrivial navigation and a nontrivial performance boost. Here, buying the hardware you need certainly isn't off the shelf, but most of the pieces might be available. I suspect you'd find yourself blowing another large fraction of your budget even before the requisite development on this part.
The lunar rover and communications presents another set of challenges, which it sounds like CMU may well have experience with.
But, I'd say hiring NASA engineers is the wrong way to win this on a budget. NASA couldn't even begin to touch this prize for $100M. If you hire engineers who are used to working with budgets on a NASA size, you'll get a solution that costs NASA price tags, or close to them. If you want to spend a couple hundred million winning the prize, just to prove you can, it'll work -- but I would say that's kind of silly. I don't think this prize will be won for less than $20M, but I think it will be won for not a huge amount more.
Personally, I think Carmack and the rest of the people at Armadillo Aerospace are much more interesting to watch. If he continues at his current pace, he'll have hardware in LEO long before this prize expires, and on a much smaller budget than anyone has done before. And he's already been talking about what would be needed to win this prize. If you want to watch the interesting show, don't look to the people that say they'll do it the old way -- look to the people that want to do it orders of magnitude cheaper than it's been done before, by turning every piece of conventional wisdom on its head, and are busy proving they can rather than trumpeting their barely formed plans to the press.
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The X Prize is an apt comparison. Estimates I've heard put Scaled's budget for the $10M prize at approximately $30M. I'm reasonably confident the prize can't be won for $20M -- but I think it can be won for not a lot more than that, as I said in my original post. The point of winning the X-prize was only in small part to prove it can be done. A large part was as the impetus for and partial funding of the early R&D for SpaceShipTwo. There are certainly markets available to you if you can win this pr
Re:Hardly an advantage (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say you could stop the costs ballooning by hiring NASA engineers, and not NASA bureaucrats. I have been of the opinion for some time that the problem with NASA is that it is expected to do too little science with too much money (don't hate me!). Give these people ten million and tell them to get to the moon, and you will come out with a lean, well designed system that can get there and do what you want. Give them one hundred million and you'll get a bloated project with too many unnecessary people on board and too much red tape to do anything properly. That is the whole point of things like the X-Prize. The knowledge and experience are out there. The technology (or close to it) is out there. The scientific community is slowly coming to the realisation that leaving things like this to government agencies will not give results. NASA has provided the groundwork without which none of this would be possible, but it is time to take what we have learned there, and run with it.
Parent
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Just make the price a higher priority than safety or other factors.
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May have to rethink some ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
The Apollo astronauts found out a hard truth about the surface of the Moon when the wen too drill deep core samples -- the Moon is pretty hard. Drilling required a lot of effort, even when they had appropriate equipment. Drills generated a lot of torque as they tried to penetrate the lunar hardpan. The lunar surface is apparently very compacted, unlike earthly soil which undergoes the action of weathering. I'm not sure 250 kilos will necessarily be enough unless they find an efficient method to hold the rover down to the surface as it drills.
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How about four smaller drills at the corners - don't need to penetrate too far - just enough to anchor the corners down. Or pitons and cams to anchor itself before drilling. Or some nice sticky pads base don the new gecko-like technologies around.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Everybody is thinking too literally (Score:2)
Getting rid of the torque should be easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting sufficient down force sounds like it'd be the hard part. A few clamps or climbing cams might do the trick if you can find a good location to insert them.
The Competition (Score:2)
If you want to help compete, get in touch with him (Score:3, Interesting)
Split the money and the goals (Score:2)
Hardly an unfair advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
Whittaker also has some previous experience with the DARPA Grand Challenge [wikipedia.org], the desert robotics race, which CMU (his team) lost both times. He obviously knows his stuff when it comes to mechanical engineering, and were it not for the Stanford team, CMU would have undoubtedly won. But the Stanford team showed that brainpower triumphed over the "brute force" methods that CMU used. Stanford tackled the "hard computer science" problem instead, and used a standard video camera instead of the laser rangefinders (and pre-computed waypoints) that CMU used. I would have liked to see the Challenge continue because I think that Stanford's surprise victory would have changed the race dramatically the following year.
There's a pretty entertaining NOVA [pbs.org] documentary about it as well. My brother (an engineer) and I (a CS student) could help but laugh at and feel envy for the guy who built the self-guided motorcycle ("Ghost Rider").
So, yeah, CMU has Whittaker, and lots of money, but that almost doesn't matter.
Getting there is half the fun (Score:4, Informative)
It seems that one of the hardest parts of the prize is the communications problem. The prize conditions specify approximately a gigabyte of data to be transmitted from the moon, with some data gathered on-site and some carried along by the vehicle. It turns out that the data rate necessary to transmit that much data within one lunar day seems to be higher than can realistically be achieved without an aimed high-gain antenna. That in turn puts a lower bound on the size of hardware that has to be landed on the moon.
[*: On the most fasciniating list I've ever lurked.]
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More to the point, does he have to go in in one piece?!
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0.02 != 0.227