Armadillo Aerospace Claims Level 2 Lunar Lander Prize 134
Dagondanum writes "Armadillo Aerospace has officially won the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Level 2, on a rainy day at Caddo Mills, Texas. Reports came in from various locations during the day and spectators posted videos and images using social networking tools such as Twitter. The Level 2 prize requires the rocket to fly for 180 seconds before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface constructed with craters and boulders. The minimum flight times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform a real descent from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon. First place is a prize of $1 million while second is $500,000."
Woohooo (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool.
The flight looked amazingly stable.
GO Armadillo Aerospace. I'm just impressed and pleased that they made it.
Re:Woohooo (Score:1, Insightful)
Informative? Who wanders Slashdot with mod-points these days? Valley Girls?
Re:Google x-prize? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then maybe the time limit should be extended. And perhaps it should be geared more towards research teams from academia rather than commercial industries.
First off, this is a much loftier goal (far more difficult than suborbital space flight), so naturally it will take longer to achieve. That's to be expected.
Secondly, these type of high-risk, low (immediate) commercial return ventures are inherently unappealing to private commercial industries. Things like space exploration and basic research are long-term investments in the future of humanity. Private industries prefer short-term investments with immediate returns. That's why government agencies like NASA and publicly-funded research organizations like CERN are needed. Otherwise these tasks would never be undertaken.
Lastly, it would probably speed up the process (of returning to the moon) if NASA hadn't decided to take all that publicly-funded space research/technology and auction it off to the highest bidder, basically turning it into private research (to be guarded as trade secrets) and proprietary technologies that are inaccessible to public researchers. I mean, we went from having no space program to landing on the moon in just under 11 years. Returning to the moon 4 decades later in 5 to 7 years really isn't that unreasonable—given that we're able to build on previously acquired knowledge and experience and actually have the motivation as a society to return to the moon.
Re:Market It As a Toy! (Score:2, Insightful)
But something that would be difficult to scale is the electronics. I don't know what precisely Armadillo is using right now, but I know it includes a Crossbow IMU. The control system for a rocket needs high quality gyros, and while the Crossbow is cheap by the rarefied standards of military avionics, it's still a good fifty grand, and is definitely not something that can be replaced by a wiimote accelerometer.