coondoggie writes "NASA said it will this week award $1.65 million in prize money to a pair of aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again. NASA's Centennial Challenges program, which was managed by the X Prize Foundation, will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace for successfully completing the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge."
That's "closed-minded" not "close minded". And those prefixes aren't the sole purview of the organizations that define SI. They were being used in science and technical fields long before SI. And, if I'm not mistaken, bit and byte aren't even SI units.
"It's almost as easy to click the link and RTFA as it is to complain about the summary..."
True, but it doesn't accomplish the same thing.
If you RTFA you find out where the error in TFS came from; complaining about the summary may or may not accomplish this.
If you complain, you draw attention to the poor quality of the summary. RTFA will not do this.
Now, you can argue about what good it does to draw attention to the summary - clearly it's not like the editors care what we think of their work. I can't argue with wanting to make a point, though, and I certainly don't get where the moderators come up with GP as a troll.
Occasionally, but most of the time the link is to a blog, writing about another blog, who linked to a new article on some aggregator site like Engadget, that may link to the NASA article, but probably links to someone elses blog about the original article.
Rarely are the links to the actual content, without a bunch of opinions and misinterpretations thrown in for good measure.
woot! I've been cheering for Armadillo for a long time, hopefully we can prevent the first strogg attack if they can gain pace and get the number 1 spot soon.
Armadillo completed the challenge several months ago, but their landing accuracy was slightly worse than Masten's attempt. Masten completed the challenge only one day before the expiration of the contest, and was able to do it only because another competitor failed and the X prize foundation allowed Masten to use their launch window (they'd earlier used up their scheduled time slots without doing a successful flight). Armadillo didn't have time or launch permits to go back and improve their accuracy.
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Armadillo completed the challenge several months ago, but their landing accuracy was slightly worse than Masten's attempt. Masten completed the challenge only one day before the expiration of the contest, and was able to do it only because another competitor failed and the X prize foundation allowed Masten to use their launch window (they'd earlier used up their scheduled time slots without doing a successful flight). Armadillo didn't have time or launch permits to go back and improve their accuracy.
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Not only that. Carmack's vehicle was bigger and thus closer to the real thing, and more difficult to handle. However the control was so accurate that the vehicle hardly oscillated or rotated at all. Much better than Masten's vehicle - even an amateur like me could see it.
IMO Carmack should get the 1st prize. Mastens did also very good job, and would deserve the 1st prize, if Carmack's vehicle were absent.
The real key to successfully land the lander is to understand that you need to apply enough thrust to slow your descent without actually reversing the velocity of the craft. If you can balance that action so that you end up only a couple pixels off the ground, you can safely put the lander down on any flat surface.
The other problem is to navigate to a flat surface, but that is also easily solved by pressing the left and right arrow keys.
As for actual controls, I prefer using the spacebar to activate the rockets, although some people like the down arrow key.
The real key to successfully land the lander is to understand that you need to apply enough thrust to slow your descent without actually reversing the velocity of the craft.
Yes, well known since the days of the HP 65 [wikipedia.org]("the first programmable handheld calculator in outer space") Lunar Lander [rskey.org].
Hitting the backspace key in the Commodore Pet version give you negative thrust. It would actually pull you down to the lunar surface, but your lander would gain fuel. Quite useful at times.
Wow, so in 10 years Armadillo went from a rocket club with a bunch of guys launching hobby motors in fields to building moon landers?
More accurately "to building self guided rocket powered models capable of vertical take off and landing". The craft couldn't survive the boost to orbit, let alone the extreme environment of the Earth-Moon cruise, let alone the extreme environment of the landing phase and the lunar surface. Homebrew liquid fueled engines and homebrew control systems are kinda impressive
The other team had a whole extra day to improve their results that Armadillo did not. This is totally and blatantly unfair, and he has every right to be pissed.
Garbage like this will dissuade other teams from entering, no doubt.
"Blatantly unfair"... hmm... I take it you don't work in the business world?:-)
I agree it doesn't sound right but then lots of people on slashdot shout that NASA should behave more like a business concern and less like a bloated government department... being totally and blatantly unfair when it suits them to get the results they want is a good way towards operating like many major corporations...
The should absolutely behave like a business concern.
But when people are robbed of their just rewards, especially for short-sighted PR reasons, it undermines the trust in the organization itself. Who in their right mind would now put up real money and effort into competing for this prize, when the organizers have already shown that they're perfectly happy to cheat?
I'd say it seems like pretty god business, though still blatantly unfair.
NASA's main interest, and the purpose for funding such competitions, is in fostering private research into rocketry and space travel. This decision makes sense for several reasons: firstly, it allowed an extra device to be successfully tested, providing important data for the project developers, aiding them in improving their technologies. Secondly, it enabled them to give the lions share of funding to the more impoverished of the two
I had a programable HP calculator. I believe it was a HP-41C. That had a lander program where you needed to enter figures to determine your decent onto the moon.
That was many, many years ago. So can I now get the money for wasting so much time on it?
Two years ago I worked with my son to build a Lunar Lander program on his TI calculator; it was pretty much his introduction to programming. Good times.
The team that ended up 'beating' Armadillo's accuracy was given an extra day of flights. This didn't make John Carmack or many others very happy. At the same time, people are more upset with what appears to be arbitrary judging than competition. I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team. In fact, during previous attempts this happened with RR and AA.
I don't think anyone is going to be surprised that I am unhappy about Masten getting a fourth shot at the level 2 prize. I understand that there is a desire to award all the prize money this year and be able to close the books on the LLC, but I don't think it is fair. If you can just call an abort each day, you can keep anyone else from flying. Three swings, three misses, time's up.
John Carmack
For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real shot at completing the level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy. If they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit of a sheepish mea culpa. Nobody to be upset at except myself. We could have probably made a second flight in the drizzle on our scheduled days, and once we had the roll thruster issue sorted out, our landing accuracy would have been in the 20cm range. I never thought it was worth investing in differential RTK GPS systems, because it has no bearing on our commercial operations.
The current situation, where Masten was allowed a third active day of competition, after trying and failing on both scheduled days, is different. I don't hold anything against Masten for using an additional time window that has been offered, since we wouldn't have passed it up if we were in their situation, but I do think this was a mistake on the judges part.
I recognize that it is in the best interests of both the NASA Centennial Challenges department and the X-Prize Foundation to award all the prize money this year, and that will likely have indirect benefits for us all in coming years. It is probably also beneficial to the nascent New Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have other resources to draw upon. Permit me to be petty enough to be upset and bitter about a half million dollars being taken from me and given to my competitor.
The rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything up to and including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it necessary, so there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do feel that we have been robbed. I was going to argue that if Masten was allowed to take a window on an unscheduled day with no notice, the judges should come back to Texas on Sunday and let us take our unused second window to try for a better accuracy, but our FAA waiver for the LLC vehicle was only valid for the weekend of our scheduled attempt.
I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team.
And indeed, after Masten's third attempt, their rocket was damaged badly enough by a fire that they really thought they wouldn't be able to fly the next day, regardless of the judges' decision. It was the help of volunteers from other competing teams that got them off the ground the next day. In addition to fixing the problem that caused the fire, they essentially needed to replace all the wiring on the rocket.
And the next day, a bunch of Masten's team members drove up to FAR and helped Unreasonable Rocket to troubleshoot their rockets -- even though success by Unreasonable could only cost them prize money.
The members of these teams are not only ridiculously talented, they're also ridiculously open and supportive of each other. It's a bit humbling to watch.
Yeah, but it sounds like Carmack's argument is that he thinks that he could do even better yet again if they had an extra flight. Which makes sense, every time you do a test flight, you learn something, and so that should make your next flight even better. Take this further, and if your ultimate goal is to get the best possible design, then the contest should never end, because there's always room for improvement.
But in reality, when you create a contest, you have to have rules and you have to have a deadline. Bending the rules for one team but not the others is generally unfair. The extra day most certainly did help, because apparently their craft was unable to fly on its three "regulation" attempts.
Apparently since doing their lunar lander run Armadillo Aerospace has been keeping itself busy with "boosted hops," where they fire the rocket up to a certain altitude, and then land back down under the rocket's own power. Here's a neat video of them boosting up to ~1000 feet:
Starting with lower altitudes, each time they run they're going for an incrementally higher altitude. They've gone up to about 1932 feet (589m) [youtube.com] so far, with the plan to go all the way up to 6000 feet, which is the highest their FAA permit allows them to currently launch. I believe both Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have a number of customers in the scientific community who want to use these sorts of controlled boosted hops for running things like microgravity experiments.
close enough, we still need to build them here where there is gravity, bring it there where there is none and have it do what it was designed to do at like you said at 1/6th of earths gravity.
1/6th of Earth's gravity is far from no gravity. And if you're in no gravity then you're not in 1/6th gravity.
if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G.
FYI, this wasn't a simulation in the sense of a computer simulation, but rather in the sense that they were not actually required to perform this test on the moon. As far as I can tell from TFA, the only thing "simulated" was the Level 2 landing site which instead of a flat landing pad was a rocky surface designed to "simulate" the surface of the moon.
So, these were real rockets that were really taking off, traveling horizontally, and landing vertically. Yes gravity would be lower on the moon (not zero) and that could certainly introduce some kinds but I think this is still a worthwhile demonstration of working technology.
Sometimes people confuse it not having enough gravitational pull to help us achieve escape velocity as we jump off the top of the jungle gym or at the apex of the highest swing that could ever have possibly been done on a swing with not having gravitational pull at all.
I mean, the first time I threw a rock at the moon (1985?), I assumed it just went all the way there. I never saw it come down, nor did the broken car window next door have anything to do with this story.
The difference is in cost. The hope is that for mere eraser shavings we can have small private companies develop the modern guidance and control software for a lander that would take traditional contractors with NASA direction much more to develop.
When someone says "we did it 50 years ago" remind them that we did it then with 3-4 times the budget, and improved computer technology only lends incremental advantages -- plus that there was some loss of institutional knowledge of vehicle development since we ha
Yes unfortunately 30 years ago. We stopped doing it. And after 30 years most of the people who were involved retired. Or are near retiring. IF we kept it up we will probably be so much better at space travel. However the shuttle product made space travel a bad thing for government, to expensive and not far reaching enough. We need to get off the idea of the StarTrek reusable ship. Until we get much better at it.
How do we get better at it if we don't practice, make mistakes, make surprising discoveries about what works right although we never expected it to?
We'll never learn anything if we don't try.
However, we're not really going to leave our solar system any time soon for any useful reason until we can break some things we consider 'laws of physics'. Space is just too big and it'll take too long to do anything useful. It takes too long to do anything useful other than what we can manage in orbit already. The m
Invention isn't linear. We don't actually have to be building spaceplanes in order to improve the technology required for spaceplanes.
The atmospheric portion of any spaceflight involves the same techniques as atmospheric flight in general- improving the technologies for regular flight helps with spaceflight.
The space-based portion of spaceflight involves the same techniques, regardless of whether your craft is reusable. Getting better at spaceflight in general will mean we're better at reusable spaceflight.
Ships can, and should be reusable. In deep space. The solution is to decouple deep space travel and launch - when you're launching the ship you need multistage and some other tricks to escape the gravity well. But when you're in space you can use the same ship to travel to Mars and back twice, with only a refueling stop, since it takes rather little energy to propel yourself once you're out of Earth's gravity.
It seems to me that the point of these exercises is to get the civilian programs up to speed and with their own technology.
If a civilian company can duplicate or even best NASA at these "rudimentary" tasks, said company may be in a better position to be entirely self dependent.
If we can encourage these companies to "reinvent the wheel" now, they will be in a really good position to _not_ need NASA as a crutch on issues in the future.
Not to be a negative nancy, but didn't we *actually* do this like 50 years ago?
What's next, a $1 million prize to the first company that can build a hydrogen bomb, construct a MOSFET (or something else the government did 50 years ago).
NASA used a lunar lander (which was developed by a private contractor) roughly 40 not 50 years ago. Bell Labs not government developed the MOSFET. And unlike lunar landers, we still have operable hydrogen bombs and MOSFETs today.
It just seems sad that we are still at this point, 50 years later.
Well, things didn't work out. If we want to get back to the point we were 35-40 years ago, we have to redevelop the technology.
What's next, a $1 million prize to the first company that can... construct a MOSFET (or something else the government did 50 years ago).
Exactly whom do you think constructs mosfets? Wisconsin Department of Transportation? USDA? BATF?
Now if the offered a $1M prize for the first mosfet that switches 200 KW yet fits in a SOT-23 package (surface mount, about one by three millimeters) for like electric cars and stuff, that would be interesting...
Until 10 years ago, Rockets were the domain of NASA, it's billionaire contractors, and freckle-faced kids. Not you've got people from all kinds of backgrounds excited and building new designs, trying new things, and raising a new generation of inventors, engineers, and students.
That's the point of these contests - more rocket scientists, tech, and healthy innovation.
humm (Score:3, Interesting)
1M + 0.5M = 1.65M !
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That's "closed-minded" not "close minded". And those prefixes aren't the sole purview of the organizations that define SI. They were being used in science and technical fields long before SI. And, if I'm not mistaken, bit and byte aren't even SI units.
Re:humm (Score:4, Informative)
The extra $150,000 was awarded to one of the companies for their completion of an earlier phase.
Parent
Re:humm (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's almost as easy to click the link and RTFA as it is to complain about the summary..."
True, but it doesn't accomplish the same thing.
If you RTFA you find out where the error in TFS came from; complaining about the summary may or may not accomplish this.
If you complain, you draw attention to the poor quality of the summary. RTFA will not do this.
Now, you can argue about what good it does to draw attention to the summary - clearly it's not like the editors care what we think of their work. I can't argue with wanting to make a point, though, and I certainly don't get where the moderators come up with GP as a troll.
Parent
Re:humm (Score:5, Funny)
Holy crap there are links to articles in the summaries?!?
Parent
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Occasionally, but most of the time the link is to a blog, writing about another blog, who linked to a new article on some aggregator site like Engadget, that may link to the NASA article, but probably links to someone elses blog about the original article.
Rarely are the links to the actual content, without a bunch of opinions and misinterpretations thrown in for good measure.
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When did you hear of a NASA project that DIDN'T go overbudget ?
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armadillo placed second! (Score:2)
woot! I've been cheering for Armadillo for a long time, hopefully we can prevent the first strogg attack if they can gain pace and get the number 1 spot soon.
Re:armadillo placed second! (Score:4, Insightful)
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
and the X prize foundation allowed
NASA allowed Masten not the X Prize Foundation.
Re:armadillo placed second! (Score:4, Insightful)
Armadillo completed the challenge several months ago, but their landing accuracy was slightly worse than Masten's attempt. Masten completed the challenge only one day before the expiration of the contest, and was able to do it only because another competitor failed and the X prize foundation allowed Masten to use their launch window (they'd earlier used up their scheduled time slots without doing a successful flight). Armadillo didn't have time or launch permits to go back and improve their accuracy.
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Not only that. Carmack's vehicle was bigger and thus closer to the real thing, and more difficult to handle. However the control was so accurate that the vehicle hardly oscillated or rotated at all. Much better than Masten's vehicle - even an amateur like me could see it.
IMO Carmack should get the 1st prize. Mastens did also very good job, and would deserve the 1st prize, if Carmack's vehicle were absent.
Parent
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It's all about timing and thrust vectors (Score:5, Funny)
The real key to successfully land the lander is to understand that you need to apply enough thrust to slow your descent without actually reversing the velocity of the craft. If you can balance that action so that you end up only a couple pixels off the ground, you can safely put the lander down on any flat surface.
The other problem is to navigate to a flat surface, but that is also easily solved by pressing the left and right arrow keys.
As for actual controls, I prefer using the spacebar to activate the rockets, although some people like the down arrow key.
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Yes, well known since the days of the HP 65 [wikipedia.org]("the first programmable handheld calculator in outer space") Lunar Lander [rskey.org].
CC.
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Other private space companies are Doomed. (Score:5, Funny)
Rocket Club to Nasa Winner (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, so in 10 years Armadillo went from a rocket club with a bunch of guys launching hobby motors in fields to building moon landers?
D
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More accurately "to building self guided rocket powered models capable of vertical take off and landing". The craft couldn't survive the boost to orbit, let alone the extreme environment of the Earth-Moon cruise, let alone the extreme environment of the landing phase and the lunar surface.
Homebrew liquid fueled engines and homebrew control systems are kinda impressive
Carmack was robbed (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2009/10/30/armadillos-mccormack-robbed-ngllc-judges/ [parabolicarc.com]
The other team had a whole extra day to improve their results that Armadillo did not. This is totally and blatantly unfair, and he has every right to be pissed.
Garbage like this will dissuade other teams from entering, no doubt.
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Its not fair, but the universe doesn't have a concept of fair, just reality (or this dimensions version of reality away, thats open to debate)
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What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with "the universe", it's about the specific, deliberate decisions of crooked, misguided judges.
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Agreed!
NASA really administered this contest poorly. At a minimum, the prize money should have been equal and in my opinion, not even that would be fair.
It is really frustrating when the "judges" make rules allowances late in the game.
You don't work in business I assume? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Blatantly unfair" ... hmm... I take it you don't work in the business world? :-)
I agree it doesn't sound right but then lots of people on slashdot shout that NASA should behave more like a business concern and less like a bloated government department... being totally and blatantly unfair when it suits them to get the results they want is a good way towards operating like many major corporations...
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The should absolutely behave like a business concern.
But when people are robbed of their just rewards, especially for short-sighted PR reasons, it undermines the trust in the organization itself. Who in their right mind would now put up real money and effort into competing for this prize, when the organizers have already shown that they're perfectly happy to cheat?
That's bad business.
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I'd say it seems like pretty god business, though still blatantly unfair.
NASA's main interest, and the purpose for funding such competitions, is in fostering private research into rocketry and space travel. This decision makes sense for several reasons: firstly, it allowed an extra device to be successfully tested, providing important data for the project developers, aiding them in improving their technologies. Secondly, it enabled them to give the lions share of funding to the more impoverished of the two
Already done (Score:2)
I had a programable HP calculator. I believe it was a HP-41C. That had a lander program where you needed to enter figures to determine your decent onto the moon.
That was many, many years ago. So can I now get the money for wasting so much time on it?
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It ended in some amount of controversy (Score:5, Informative)
The team that ended up 'beating' Armadillo's accuracy was given an extra day of flights. This didn't make John Carmack or many others very happy. At the same time, people are more upset with what appears to be arbitrary judging than competition. I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team. In fact, during previous attempts this happened with RR and AA.
Re:It ended in some amount of controversy (Score:5, Informative)
I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team.
And indeed, after Masten's third attempt, their rocket was damaged badly enough by a fire that they really thought they wouldn't be able to fly the next day, regardless of the judges' decision. It was the help of volunteers from other competing teams that got them off the ground the next day. In addition to fixing the problem that caused the fire, they essentially needed to replace all the wiring on the rocket.
And the next day, a bunch of Masten's team members drove up to FAR and helped Unreasonable Rocket to troubleshoot their rockets -- even though success by Unreasonable could only cost them prize money.
The members of these teams are not only ridiculously talented, they're also ridiculously open and supportive of each other. It's a bit humbling to watch.
Parent
Re:It ended in some amount of controversy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but it sounds like Carmack's argument is that he thinks that he could do even better yet again if they had an extra flight. Which makes sense, every time you do a test flight, you learn something, and so that should make your next flight even better. Take this further, and if your ultimate goal is to get the best possible design, then the contest should never end, because there's always room for improvement.
But in reality, when you create a contest, you have to have rules and you have to have a deadline. Bending the rules for one team but not the others is generally unfair. The extra day most certainly did help, because apparently their craft was unable to fly on its three "regulation" attempts.
Parent
A Real Faked Moon Landing (Score:3, Funny)
Finally some vindication for those in the tinfoil hats.
"Boosted Hop" video (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently since doing their lunar lander run Armadillo Aerospace has been keeping itself busy with "boosted hops," where they fire the rocket up to a certain altitude, and then land back down under the rocket's own power. Here's a neat video of them boosting up to ~1000 feet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYk9uGrAqn8 [youtube.com]
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=16628 [hobbyspace.com]
Starting with lower altitudes, each time they run they're going for an incrementally higher altitude. They've gone up to about 1932 feet (589m) [youtube.com] so far, with the plan to go all the way up to 6000 feet, which is the highest their FAA permit allows them to currently launch. I believe both Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have a number of customers in the scientific community who want to use these sorts of controlled boosted hops for running things like microgravity experiments.
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The Moon's gravity is 1/6th that of the Earth's; that's low, but is by no means "more or less zero".
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Well, technically it's "less zero", as in not as zero as zero...
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close enough, we still need to build them here where there is gravity, bring it there where there is none and have it do what it was designed to do at like you said at 1/6th of earths gravity.
1/6th of Earth's gravity is far from no gravity. And if you're in no gravity then you're not in 1/6th gravity.
Re:its NASA!!! (Score:5, Informative)
if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G.
FYI, this wasn't a simulation in the sense of a computer simulation, but rather in the sense that they were not actually required to perform this test on the moon. As far as I can tell from TFA, the only thing "simulated" was the Level 2 landing site which instead of a flat landing pad was a rocky surface designed to "simulate" the surface of the moon.
So, these were real rockets that were really taking off, traveling horizontally, and landing vertically. Yes gravity would be lower on the moon (not zero) and that could certainly introduce some kinds but I think this is still a worthwhile demonstration of working technology.
Parent
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The difference is in cost. The hope is that for mere eraser shavings we can have small private companies develop the modern guidance and control software for a lander that would take traditional contractors with NASA direction much more to develop.
When someone says "we did it 50 years ago" remind them that we did it then with 3-4 times the budget, and improved computer technology only lends incremental advantages -- plus that there was some loss of institutional knowledge of vehicle development since we ha
Re:Ummmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes unfortunately 30 years ago. We stopped doing it. And after 30 years most of the people who were involved retired. Or are near retiring. IF we kept it up we will probably be so much better at space travel. However the shuttle product made space travel a bad thing for government, to expensive and not far reaching enough. We need to get off the idea of the StarTrek reusable ship. Until we get much better at it.
Parent
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How do we get better at it if we don't practice, make mistakes, make surprising discoveries about what works right although we never expected it to?
We'll never learn anything if we don't try.
However, we're not really going to leave our solar system any time soon for any useful reason until we can break some things we consider 'laws of physics'. Space is just too big and it'll take too long to do anything useful. It takes too long to do anything useful other than what we can manage in orbit already. The m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Invention isn't linear. We don't actually have to be building spaceplanes in order to improve the technology required for spaceplanes.
The atmospheric portion of any spaceflight involves the same techniques as atmospheric flight in general- improving the technologies for regular flight helps with spaceflight.
The space-based portion of spaceflight involves the same techniques, regardless of whether your craft is reusable. Getting better at spaceflight in general will mean we're better at reusable spaceflight.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ships can, and should be reusable. In deep space. The solution is to decouple deep space travel and launch - when you're launching the ship you need multistage and some other tricks to escape the gravity well. But when you're in space you can use the same ship to travel to Mars and back twice, with only a refueling stop, since it takes rather little energy to propel yourself once you're out of Earth's gravity.
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It seems to me that the point of these exercises is to get the civilian programs up to speed and with their own technology.
If a civilian company can duplicate or even best NASA at these "rudimentary" tasks, said company may be in a better position to be entirely self dependent.
If we can encourage these companies to "reinvent the wheel" now, they will be in a really good position to _not_ need NASA as a crutch on issues in the future.
Teaching a man to fish vs giving a man a fish..
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Not to be a negative nancy, but didn't we *actually* do this like 50 years ago?
What's next, a $1 million prize to the first company that can build a hydrogen bomb, construct a MOSFET (or something else the government did 50 years ago).
NASA used a lunar lander (which was developed by a private contractor) roughly 40 not 50 years ago. Bell Labs not government developed the MOSFET. And unlike lunar landers, we still have operable hydrogen bombs and MOSFETs today.
It just seems sad that we are still at this point, 50 years later.
Well, things didn't work out. If we want to get back to the point we were 35-40 years ago, we have to redevelop the technology.
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What's next, a $1 million prize to the first company that can ... construct a MOSFET (or something else the government did 50 years ago).
Exactly whom do you think constructs mosfets? Wisconsin Department of Transportation? USDA? BATF?
Now if the offered a $1M prize for the first mosfet that switches 200 KW yet fits in a SOT-23 package (surface mount, about one by three millimeters) for like electric cars and stuff, that would be interesting ...
Re: (Score:2)
Until 10 years ago, Rockets were the domain of NASA, it's billionaire contractors, and freckle-faced kids. Not you've got people from all kinds of backgrounds excited and building new designs, trying new things, and raising a new generation of inventors, engineers, and students.
That's the point of these contests - more rocket scientists, tech, and healthy innovation.