2008 Lunar Lander Challenge Teams Announced

anzha writes "The X Prize Foundation announced on Monday the competing teams for the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. This year there are ten teams competing for the two prizes. The XPF has a nice matchup utility to compare the different teams' rockets. The one downside to this year though is that the competition will not have an accompanying X Prize Cup. It will be webcast, though. Full disclosure: I am on a team."

Full disclosure

[Hawthorne01]

I am not.

Re:Where is this challenge to be held?

[Anonymous Coward]

They hold it in Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

A platform in a vacuum accelerating downward at 5/6 g would simulate the Moon, but there would be practical limits on the volume and duration of the simulation.

Yeah, it's old news :)

[pavon]

Yeah, he has been doing this for several years - here is a slashdot story [slashdot.org] from 2001. Most of their major test flights have been covered here as well.

I got to see their test flight at the last X-Prize Cup in Alamagordo, NM. It's too bad they aren't joining those two events again. The actual launch was a ways off and you had to use binoculars to see much of anything but the exhaust. Regardless it was still cool to be there in person and to meet John Carmack, as well as talk to the other teams and hear about their different approaches. They also had all vehicles displayed up close (including Armadillo's when it wasn't being prepped for flight).

Team Cringely

[FirstTimeCaller]

Some of you may remember that Bob Cringely had announced plans to enter the competition. They pulled out of the competition [pbs.org] but still plan to land on the moon.

Re:Where is this challenge to be held?

[BiggerBoat]

No vacuum needed from a demonstration standpoint -- just hold it at Holloman as planned: counteracting Earth's 1G for the 180 seconds of the level II part of the competition generally demonstrates the Delta-v [wikipedia.org] necessary to go from the Moon's surface to orbital rendezvous (or the reverse).

This "rules explained" page [xprize.org] goes over this concept in a lot more detail, along with more interesting info on the competition.

Re:Team Cringely

[Teancum]

That is the wrong competition that you are noting here. Robert Cringely pulled out of the Google Lunar X-Prize.

This one is the "Lunar Landing Challenge", which is quite a bit different. The entire competition is to take place here on the earth, and in fact is sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government through NASA, even though the prize money is now being administered by the X-Prize Foundation. It is a part of the "Centennial Challenges" that received some brief funding from congress as a result of the success of the original sub-orbital X-Prize.

Unlike the Lunar X-Prize, the Lunar Landing Challenge is primarily to test what kind of hardware would be needed if you are to make a lunar landing, with vertical take-off and landing requirements that only use rocket powered propulsion. As a matter of fact, some of the Lunar Landing Challenge participants may be using some of their hard-won knowledge to help with the much tougher Lunar X-Prize, but it remains to be seen what will exactly happen in that case.

I kind of agree with Robert Cringely's rationale for pulling out of the Lunar X-Prize, as his #1 complaint was in regards to getting the rules nailed down and shifting policies on things like logo requirements on the lunar lander itself (the Lunar X-Prize is expected to actually go to the Moon), and the ability to put team sponsors onto the vehicle. The article that you linked to goes into much better detail than I can go into, and there were some deep issues that brought him to pull out.