Beyond the X-PRIZE — a $1.5B Commercial Lunar Market

coondoggie writes "Optimism certainly abounds in some corners of the manned space community. Today the aerospace consultancy Futron said that as much as $1.5 billion may be up for grabs for commercial space operation in the next ten years. The consultancy singled out the $30 million Google Lunar X-PRIZE contestants as a highly likely group to take advantage of such a cash pot, but there are many others who'd like a slice of that pie as well. But it's not all wine and roses; finances loom large over any space projects, and technology development is also proving to be a bugaboo. For example, even as NASA's commercial partners, such as SpaceX and Orbital, have made steady progress in developing space cargo transportation technology, they have also recently fallen behind their development schedules."

GLXP is unwinnable

[QuantumG]

My last rant on the subject:

> Nice YouTube video on the Google Lunar X Prize competition:
>
> Moon 2.0: Join the Revolution.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4zosGUMBw [youtube.com]

Heh, I remember this video. It's about as realistic as the prize.

1. Interest in launch watching goes up 100,000%
2. The rocket is so damn fast that it can get the lander to the Moon in seconds.
3. Doesn't even need a stage to enter lunar orbit.
4. The lander doesn't even have a main engine.. apparently RCS is all
you need to land on the Moon now.
5. Uplink antennas only need to be the size of your typical hand held
umbrella.
6. The rover doesn't need to fit in the lander.
7. It doesn't even need an antenna.
8. Rutan is great, all hail SpaceShipOne. The reusable, reliable,
less expensive revolution is here! It's so reusable it never flew
again.
9. "The competition ignited a revolution that will launch thousands of
civilian passengers into space." Any day now.
10. "The Moon.. only days away" .. way to point out your own
spin-doctoring, see point 2.
11. re Apollo "These early missions learned much about the Moon .. but
they were much too expensive .. and lacked any long term plan, so in
1972 Moon 1.0 was abandoned." Ohhhh.. that's why it was abandoned..
cause there was no long term plan! I thought it was because the
public lost interest .. see point 1.
12. Cut to terribly interested people, thanks to the Internet!
13. Queue weasel words about how resources on the Moon "could" provide
Earth with clean affordable limitless energy.
14. "Much of the lunar soil is silicon, a key ingredient in solar
cells" .. *facepalm*.
15. Solar Power Satellites using lunar resources.. and there's that
weasel word again.
16. Bonus prizes for doing impossible things.. I mean, more impossible
than just winning the major prize at a profit.. which is the only
reason why you'd care about the bonuses. The one mentioned is lunar
ice.. because landing at the poles is so obviously easy with today's
super rockets, see point 2.
17. Apparently shining a torch at the ground is sufficient to do
spectral analysis to determine the presence of lunar ice. Someone
call the LCROSS folks!
18. Bonus for surviving the lunar night, complete with kitschy "wake
up now little rover" scene.
19. Oh, and the most stupid Bonus prize of them all. A prize for the
team that can find artifacts of previous lunar exploration. Yes,
that's right, because if it wasn't hard enough that we suggest you
land at the pole, we're now suggesting that you drive to the equator..
or maybe you only do this bonus, in which case you "only" have to do a
precision landing, should be no trouble with the advanced lander
propulsion system, see point 4.
20. More shots on the lander approaching the Moon at warp factor 5,
with no orbital insertion engine and no descent engine.
21. "... and this time we're planning to stay." queue music.

This video, most graphically, demonstrated to me that the GLXP is a
gimmick, backed by morons with no serious understanding of the amazing
achievement that Apollo really was. Apparently the prize will be won
by bored teenagers who will subsequently shrug off the whole "space is
hard" myth and go build a lunar base to make constellations of solar
power satellites to stick it in the face of their baby boomer
grandparents who didn't have the vision to do it the first time around
and subsequently destroyed the planet. /rant

Is it worth it?

[Tubal-Cain]

$1.5 billion? Wikipedia says the Apollo Program cost $135 billion [wikipedia.org], adjusted for inflation. I doubt many parties participating in these competitions are in it for the prize money.

Re:Is it worth it?

[burning-toast]

I'm of the opinion that setting foot on the moon the very first time was the most expensive time considering it took the entirety of human knowledge up until that time to make it happen (plus a bit of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants engineering). Each trip after that would only require a fraction of the original research as it's a matter of tuning or tweaking a somewhat known quantity (albeit still expensive).
.
What do we value all of the knowledge and research which we gained from those missions at?
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I too doubt that only the prize money is attracting them. But having 1.5B of your investment back isn't too shabby. Also being able to lay claim that you (and your corporate sponsors) were "the first to do X" for a given industry is quite important (especially to the investors).
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Overall, I like the X-prize financing scheme (as someone NOT directly involved in any way).
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For some reason I can't get paragraph breaks in my text. Pardon the periods.