Carnegie Mellon To Compete In Google Lunar X-Prize

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."

What's the controversy?

[morgan_greywolf]

If I were organizing a team, I'd hire at least ex-NASA engineer with the appropriate experience if I could, too. AFAIK, there was nothing in the rules saying that they couldn't do that. In fact, I'm pretty sure both Jeff Bezos' team Blue Origin and Scaled Composites both had ex-NASA engineers working with them on the first X Prize.

0.02 MPH?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rover travels at a maximum speed of four inches per second, which translates into 0.02 mph.

I get 4"/s = 1200'/h / 5280'/mi = 0.227 MPH.

Hardly an advantage

[evanbd]

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.

Re:Hardly an advantage

[dbolger]

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.

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.

Fairness

[benhocking]

I agree completely. I think we often sacrifice too much in the name of "fairness". We should never make things harder for those entering at the lower-end, but we should not take away advantages of those at the upper-end, either. That said, there are some ways to improve fairness (you can never really achieve fairness, only make things more fair or less fair – or both) without sacrificing anything. Perhaps something akin to information sharing could help, for example.

Getting rid of the torque should be easy

[Solandri]

Just use two counter-rotating drills simultaneously. Might be tricky when you first start and one bit bites into the rock before the other, but once they're both in the torque just gets converted into tensile and compressive stresses in the cojoining structure (like in a Chinook helicopter [wikipedia.org])

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.