Google's $30,000,000 Lunar X PRIZE

chroma writes "It's been a long time since anyone has explored the surface of the moon. But now Google has teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation to offer a $30,000,000 bounty to the first privately funded organization to land a robotic rover on the moon. Google, of course, has offered the free Google Moon mapping service for a few years now. Looks like the other search engines have some catching up to do in the space exploration department."

Self serving

[eln]

Of course Google wants people to land on the moon, they're desperate to find employees for their lunar campus [google.com].

Re:Self serving

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah...all the candidates keep mentioning all these difficult-to-meet and ridiculous requirements that must be met to employed there...like air, water, food, protection from the Sun's radiation... The interview usually ends right there.

Re:

[Gnpatton]

Of course Google wants people to land on the moon, they're desperate to find employees for their lunar campus.

Too bad that page is a parody. I would sign up for a job on the moon in a heartbeat. Maybe it isn't a parody, it is google we are talking about after all?

Re:Self serving

[eln]

Too bad that page is a parody.

Bullshit. If that page is a parody, how is it that Google has an almost endless supply of green cheese in their cafeteria? Huh? Explain that one, smart guy!

Re:

[Oktober Sunset]

green cheese? ha, don't you know anything about the moon? It's made of Emmental, you can even see the holes from Earth.

All fo these prizes are self-serving.

[WindBourne]

Business NEVER expand greatly by handling just a local area. The globe is now encompassed. Once we start moving to the solar systems, private eneterprise and spread wealth will jump.

No no no no. It's not that at all.

[jd]

It's that their crawler can't reach sites that far and their lunar indexes risk becoming stagnant.

Re:

[Skevin]

From the google Lunar campus link:
> The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in
> Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) is a fully integrated
> research, development and technology facility at which Google
> will be conducting experiments in entropized information filtering,
> high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo)

Those acronyms have nothing on the Google Open Access Taut Sphincter Explorer, opening on a .cx TLD near you!

Solomon

Shoot the Moon

[Doc Ruby]

How do I prove I landed a robot on the Moon? Can I just email a link to a YouTube video (that I shot at Capricorn One Studios)?

Re:

[athdemo]

Let it sit up there 'til Google Moon updates? It might take a while, but, hey...Robot's not doin' a whole lot up there.

Re:Shoot the Moon

[Tackhead]

> How do I prove I landed a robot on the Moon? Can I just email a link to a YouTube video (that I shot at Capricorn One Studios)?

Use a solar-powered antenna to broadcast this [evolution-control.com] on a HAM band. Once a month.

Then kick back and enjoy the FCC going into paroxysms of incoherent rage trying to shut down a pirate radio broadcaster who happens to have a transmitter on The Fucking Moon. (Sure, the FCC can pull your licnese, but it'll still have to divert half its budget into a followup lunar mission to shut the transmitter off!)

Re:

[StikyPad]

I know the FCC is God-like, but I'm pretty sure the moon is outside of their jurisdiction.

Re:Shoot the Moon

[kaizokuace]

oohh ok now I have incentive to win the x-prize.
Winning the X-prize : $30,000,000.00
The amount of money the FCC wastes to shut down your lunar pirate radio : Priceless.

Capricorn One Studios

[falconwolf]

Yea, the moon landing was all staged. There was no real moon landing.

Falcon

Inquiry

[Chairboy]

Now, do they launch with a bunch of people specifying parameters and running control equipment and whatnot?

Or do they just press the 'I'm feeling lucky' button?

Prediction...

[StressGuy]

At least one ship and/or robot explorer will be named "Alice"

fuck that, lunar x-games!

[jollyreaper]

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Could you imagine the kind of air-er, vacuum you'd get off a lunar halfpipe?

Re:

[StikyPad]

I'm not sure you could get that much higher, and it would take much, much longer. The frequency of a pendulum is proportional to the gravity. In 1/6th g it would take almost 3 times as long to complete one swing on the pipe. Say 30 seconds instead of 10 seconds. Also I believe your efforts to add energy (by varying your height) would be diminished proportionally as well. If you could keep it up, you might eventually achieve greater heights, but you also have to worry more about the landing, since, with

Lunokhod program; other thoughts

[FleaPlus]

If I recall correctly, the only unmanned rovers that have explored the Moon are the pair of rovers of the Lunokhod programme [wikipedia.org] of Russia (then Soviet Union), during the early 1970s. From wikipedia:

Lunokhod 2 was equipped with three television cameras, one mounted high on the rover for navigation, which could return high resolution images at different rates--3.2, 5.7, 10.9 or 21.1 seconds per frame (not frames per second). These images were used by a five-man team of controllers on Earth who sent driving commands to the rover in real time. There were 4 panoramic cameras mounted on the rover.

Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay, which would charge the batteries when opened. A polonium-210 radioactive heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the long lunar nights. ...

During its 322 Earth days of operations, Lunokhod 1 traveled 10.5 km and returned more than 20,000 TV images and 206 high-resolution panoramas. In addition, it performed twenty-five soil analyses with its RIFMA x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and used its penetrometer at 500 different locations.

Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 37 km (23 miles) of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back 86 panoramic images and over 80,000 TV pictures. Many mechanical tests of the surface, laser ranging measurements, and other experiments were completed during this time.

With regards to a human lunar base, I think the prize could also have great benefits. I think it's pretty much a given that robots and rovers will play an integral support role of a manned lunar base, and getting robots to operate in a lunar environment is still something we have little experience with. The prize will likely lead to discovering plenty of new ideas and techniques which do and don't work on the lunar surface.

Also, rovers are a great way to captivate people's attention. Just look at how much the Mars rovers has increased people's attention at what's going on with Mars. For my generation, lunar exploration (human or robot) is something that exists only in history books. Seeing the Moon through the eyes of a rover (a rover put up by entrepreneurs, not a government) can change that, and increase support for human exploration of the Moon.

Also, I think this is a great way for the "space == science only" crowd to get interested in private space activity. Thus far, many of them have either been ambivalent about private space, or outright antagonistic about it ("just a way for rich people to waste money"). This prize helps cement the idea that yes, private spaceflight can have benefits for science.

Re:

[MontyApollo]

I think seeing a company have a plan for making money by putting a rover on the moon will help spark people's interest too. I think it will give a sense that the "space age" will really happen instead of just the same old thing that has gone on for the last 50 years. Making money will also make people to start to think space exploration might be a good investment.

In fact,

[WindBourne]

I always laugh when I see ppl try to make it out that this will be man vs robotic exploration. That has to be the silliest thing I have ever heard. Even in USA's early days, it was lack of man power than lead to a large amount of innovation (labor was very expensive). The moon and mars will almost certainly have robots doing the building and maintence of any planet base. In fact, if NASA was smart, they would offer a prize for coming up with a robot for the ISS (above and beyond the arm). A robot could repa

Re:

[CodeBuster]

Apparently, the Lunokhod 1 [wikipedia.org] and the Luna 17 lander were sold by auction for $68500 in 1993 at Sotheby's in New York. The auction catalog listing described the spacecraft as "resting on the surface of the moon". Given that the rover and lander have been on the Moon in the Sea of Rains since November 17, 1970 at 03:47 UTC does this mean that the current owner can collect the bounty?

Prize Not Quite Adequate

[eldavojohn]

From the Faq:

15. How much do you think it will cost for a rover to get to the Moon and sustain itself throughout the competition?

Traditionally, prizes have encouraged people to invest a wide range of resources. Lindbergh was one of few to spend less than the prize amount during the Orteig prize--others, like Admiral Byrd, spent nearly $100,000, or four times the $25,000 prize value. It has been reported that Mojave Aerospace Ventures spent significantly more than the $10 million purse to win the Ansari X PRIZE. Teams are willing to spend more than the prize value, as they get to keep their intellectual property and capitalize on it. In the case of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, we expect some teams to be willing to spend more than the value of the prize. Other teams may be able to complete the mission at or below the value of the Grand Prize purse.

I don't think comparing the prize reward from a 1919 prize award of flying from Paris to NYC [wikipedia.org] is accurate. I mean, people had already been flying. How many people put things into orbit, much less on the moon?

Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million [space.com]. Granted you're only expected to send one and it's only to the moon, NASA does already have the infrastructure & experienced personel to do this. Even an 1/8 of that cost is 3 times the prize money.

Add the requirements of a 500 meter 'rove' and hi def 'Mooncast' and I think you're looking at too much risk for any person--possibly any company.

Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough. I know it may sound ridiculous but I personally think $300 million would start to entice competition. What intellectual property would you have in the end? You would have patents on specifically design tools for getting a piece of machinery to the moon only capable of Mooncasts & 500 meters of roving. I'm not so sure any company would try to enter this competition as it is a major investment and a major risk with very little gain.

Re:

[spitek]

The gain is in the unknown things that could have other applications. Here is a small subset of technologies that have come from NASA develpment and research. These are worth Billions.

Laser Angioplasty
Memory foam
Cardiac Imaging System
Infrared Thermometer
De-icing senors for air craft
Thermal Video
Space Technology for Firefighting - Lightweight air cylinders patterned on technology originally developed for rocket motor casings

Advanced Pacemaker
Implantable Heart Aid
Vision Trainer
Vehicle Controller - Lunar Rove

Re:

[evanbd]

$30M is at least enough to attract interest. John Carmack has already started talking about what would be required to do it. And given that he's the odds-on favorite to win the Lunar Lander Challenge (both levels) this year at the X-Prize Cup, I'd say that's rather interesting. It sounds like he thinks the toughest problem to solve is navigation.

Re:Prize Not Quite Adequate

[Rei]

The "airplane" analogies are always pretty dumb as soon as you scratch the surface. Even on the face of them, it's an argument that "Technology A once was poor, and now it's great, so technology B, which is poor, must inherently end up great." They're logical fallacies.

In this case, to put it in perspective, 100,000$ in 1919 is 1.3 million [westegg.com] in today's dollars. A realistic price for this mission by small teams is 50-100 million, with a high risk of failure. For that kind of money, you're not going to get a bunch of little teams like you got for the regular X-prize, which was a (proportionally) extremely simple task. You're not even going to get the idealists. The budget rules out the vast majority of them, and the few idealists who love space issues enough to put forth that kind of cash -- like, say, Musk -- are already going to be putting their money toward space in their preferred method (with their own companies) instead of competing for some prize. That kind of money for investment in this prize would have to come from Wall Street, which wants a return on it's investment.

Not going to happen.

Re:

[FleaPlus]

A realistic price for this mission by small teams is 50-100 million, with a high risk of failure.

I could be faulty, but my assumption is that the bulk of the cost will be the launcher, which would likely be purchased as an off-the-shelf service from SpaceX, Russia, or some-such. I kind of figure that a team would spend its money developing the launcher and lander (expensive, but not -that- expensive), and then after doing that would commit to paying for the launcher. Of course, I think it's also assumed that as with the Ansari X Prize, the prize will only cover part of the cost.

I figure you might know

Re:

[Rei]

Have you priced launchers lately? Including the stages for braking at the moon?

There is no single "minimal weight for launcher + lander". Minimal weight for the lander is x as x approaches 0, if you don't care about lunar impact speed ;) Okay, okay. Delta-V to the lunar surface is ~13.8k m/s. Throw in another 2k for atmospheric drag and gravity losses during launch, so 15.8k m/s. Let's see if a Falcon 9 could do it for the first part -- heavy lift Falcon 9 could get 12,000 kg to GTO, but that leaves 1

SpaceX

[falconwolf]

You're not going to get a better buy than the Falcons, so better hope that they work and SpaceX doesn't go belly-up ;)

Although it's possible SpaceX will go belly up, I seriously doubt it will, the only way I can this happening is if they can't deliver. If it were then Richard Branson wouldn't be investing or putting in orders for any SpaceShipOnes [globalsecurity.org] so he could offer flights to space tourists. His Virgin Galactic [usatoday.com] has sold tickets to its first 150 passengers for $200,000 each. They have collected more tha

Re:

[falconwolf]

The budget rules out the vast majority of them, and the few idealists who love space issues enough to put forth that kind of cash -- like, say, Musk -- are already going to be putting their money toward space in their preferred method (with their own companies) instead of competing for some prize.

And who's to say one of those companies won't be the one that does it? I bet Richard Branson will be willing to invest in a company that shows they are capable of landing a craft on the moon. He's already offe

Re:

[bit01]

Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough.

Some people may aim for the prize simply because it's fun. No other reason is needed.

Why climb a mountain? Why live? It's a pretty sad life that's only interested in putting extra zeros on a bank account.

---

Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world. [yarchive.net]

-- Mary Shafer, risks researcher, NASA

May not be so hard....

[Notquitecajun]

Actually, this may be a matter of cost, not technology - a cost that may be easily regained by the winnings. Someone may just need the incentive to do it. Putting a man on the moon is hard...putting a robot...eh, not so much. We launch something out of orbit every few years now, so the tech is there. Heck, the expense may be designing the robot, not the delivery system.

Re:

[cowscows]

Are you implying that you have a way to send a payload to the moon that costs less than $10 million per launch?

Granted, a little rover and a delivery system can weigh significantly less than a 3 person capsule and a manned lunar lander, but it still takes a lot of energy to get out of the atmosphere and to a lunar orbit.

If you know how to build a rocket capable of sending something to the moon for less than ten million bucks, then you really should start your own company.

This rover could be Really Small

[Thagg]

Given the specifications, it should be possible to do something that more "jumps" than "roves", but certainly gets around on the moon, and transmits data back to earth, for maybe a few dozen grams. The rocket that takes it from LEO to the moon might have to weigh 10 to 20 times that, but still we're talking about something on the order of a pound or two.

And something that light should be able to piggyback on almost any launch.

Thad

robots.txt?

[adnonsense]

Will this robotic rover obey the moon's robots.txt? (It's available by querying the Tycho crater).

FYI the robots.txt for Jupiter's Galilean moons looks like this:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /io/
Allow: /ganymede/
Allow: /callisto/
Disallow: /europa/

Re:

[Ashe Tyrael]

"All these search results are yours, except Europa. Attempt no linking there."

This is great for space exploration

[Gnostic Ronin]

I think this will turn out to be a great thing for kickstarting civillian exploration of space. Nasa is too big and bloated to do it, even when congress doesn't strip funding to spend on the Ospray project. Civillians will be the ones to conquer space because they will reap the rewards -- mineral wealth, land rights, and civillian colonist user fees. Anything like that would be "public domain" if NASA goes first -- which doesn't make them eager. They get the same reward whether they succeed or not.

Property Rights?

[NEOtaku17]

So what if a private company actually does make it to the moon? Is it possible for them to claim property there? How does private property work on the moon? It seems to me that according to the homestead principle one could claim parts of the moon if they change the land in some significant way. Who knows. Maybe we could see some resort casinos open up in 2050.

Re:

[Colin Smith]

None. Which is the big problem.

 

Re:

[Cajun Hell]

Is it possible for them to claim property there?

Of course. Who could stop them?

It seems to me that according to the homestead principle one could claim parts of the moon

The homestead principle has nothing to do with it. It's the force principle. If you're the strongest entity around (and that's pretty much guaranteed if you're the only entity there), then you have total authority.

No one owns the moon...

[NotQuiteReal]

See Outer Space Treaty [wikipedia.org]

But I see Columbia, for instance hasn't signed... so if some drug lord funds the trip, and they launch from Columbia, maybe they can claim it.

I want to know if you can grab old Apollo landing memorabilia... if you could return it to Earth, it would fetch quite a price on eBay.

If you can't return it, is it black mail to collect money for NOT defacing it?

Re:

[taustin]

As I recall, the Space Treaty doesn't apply to individuals or private companies, only governments.

Re:

[falconwolf]

As I recall, the Space Treaty doesn't apply to individuals or private companies, only governments.

Actually the wiki article says it does:

"Responsibility for activities in space" [wikipedia.org]
"Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty deals with international responsibility, stating that "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty" and that States Parties s

We need to up the stakes

[east coast]

30 million for such a feat? Bah! There will be no serious contestants. We need to pass around the hat and get that up to a reputable figure that will bring out the serious engineers and rocket scientists.

I'll do my part. The pot is now up to $30,000,005.00.

That's cash money!

Re:

[CrazyJim1]

Man, I did the calculations. Even with recycling my used bottles the fuel just doesn't work out. I did the math by borrowing a rocket from NASA, but that only brings my expenditures down to $30,000,004.99. With that ph@t $5 in the pot, I can take down a cool penny for this trip. Unfortunately the robot is just a roomba and has no recharging station. I'm not sure if it will suck up too much dust and suffocate or run out of battery first. At least we get to find out now.

Post not meant to be condescending

[CrazyJim1]

Check it, they have a donate tab where you can donate like a nonprofit for tax deductions.

Re:

[shystershep]

Make that $30,000,005.63!!

Privately funded?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> privately funded organization

You mean like Congress?

If IBM, Apple, Sun, or even MS was smart

[WindBourne]

they would add to it (say double or triple). In doing so, they get their name alongside of Google's. More importantly, they would be known with major firsts. Hell, Each of these companies spend more than 60 million on ad campaigns that absolutely sux.

3rd place

[Harmonious Botch]

It is cheaper to offer a suplementary prize for 3rd place of 5 million, knowing it is a virtual certainty that it won't be collected.

All the vehicles?

[nuzak]

Are they awarding the prize for the post-launch delivery, or does the organization have to design the ground-based launch vehicle too? Governments aren't too keen on private enterprises developing their own ICBM's, yunno.

Re:

[FleaPlus]

Are they awarding the prize for the post-launch delivery, or does the organization have to design the ground-based launch vehicle too?

I guess they could build their own launcher, although it seems more likely that they'll purchase services from an existing company. From the MSNBC article it looks like SpaceX [wikipedia.org] is one of the official supporters and is offering a 10% discount on launch services to contestants:

SpaceX says it will offer each team an in-kind contribution that, in effect, represents a 10 percent reduction in the price of a Falcon rocket launch. ...

But this week, SpaceX's millionaire founder, Elon Musk, told me he thought an unmanned trip to the moon was eminently doable in that price range.

"They might be able to get this done maybe for $20 million, and they could actually potentially make money with the prize," he said.

Musk said SpaceX's two-stage Falcon 1 could get a payload to the moon, as long as the team's spacecraft was equipped with third-stage capability for entering lunar orbit. "I would just take the same engine I was going to land on the moon with, and add some tanks that you could drop off," he said.

Musk said his current pick to win the prize would be Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which has spent years developing a succession of rocket prototypes. Led by video-game programmer John Carmack, the Armadillo team is considered the favorite to win the top prize in the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at next month's Wirefly X Prize Cup, an annual rocket festival in New Mexico.

Why does Google do this?

[StarfishOne]

I mean.. that's no moon! ^_^

Cool, but

[Cajun Hell]

Why is Google doing this? Is it really just about the founders' dreams, or is there actually an angle here, where Google somehow ends up making money?

Google Should Go Nuclear Instead...

[KonoWatakushi]

If Google can throw millions of dollars at something like this, then it is extremely disappointing that they are not funding the next stage of Dr. Bussard's work. For a small fraction of this prize, they could verify the Polywell [wikipedia.org] IEC fusion concept. In addition to solving our energy and pollution problems, this is probably the single quickest way to enabling large scale space activity. Without a space elevator or at least nuclear rockets, any large scale space activity will be impossible anyway.

For those who missed it, Dr. Bussard gave a talk at Google, and the video is available here [google.com].

Google on the moon

[falconwolf]

Perhaps Google can partner with Richard Branson, but then again perhaps Branson will win it.

Falcon

analysis of the prize

[EricBoyd]

Over at my blog I go into some detail... I wish they had thought about the prize more, they left so much on the table! http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2007/09/lunar_xprize_mo.html [digitalcrusader.ca]

5 Reasons No One Will Win Google's X Prize

[mattnyc99]

Popular Mechanics' space correspondent, who's been in the trenches with Burt Rutan, Steve Fossett and Buzz Aldrin, comes out HARD against the lunar X Prize [popularmechanics.com], calling it a publicity stunt. And why not?

The USSR did this in 1970

[Animats]

The USSR sent robots to the moon in 1970 and 1973. [wikipedia.org] Big, car-sized rovers. They worked well, too. Lunokhod 1 was operational for 322 days, and and Lunokhod 2 for about four months. $1 travelled about 10km, and #2 travelled a total of 37km, so those large vehicles got around quite a bit.

It would be possible to redo that mission today. Lunokhod 3, never launched, is in a museum. Improved versions of the Proton booster used in 1970 are available from International Launch Services. The lunar landing module would have to be newly constructed, but the design is proven.

Already working on it!

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Basicly the mission requires two things: a launcher and a robot.
I've got a subscription to the Iqbot magazine so in about a year I've got the robot covered.
Now for the launcher I'm going to need some help: send me all the rubber bands and pillows you can find. I'll need about 505 million and 4 rubber bands to get the robot into a decaying orbit around the moon. 5000 pillows should be sufficent to give the robot a soft landing.
Ofcourse the launch window has to be exactly right. This has to be Cowboyneals bedroom window, we might need to remove a few walls, roof and floor to accomodated for the rubber band robot launcher. And since we have to launch at exactly 11:23pm, some neighbours may complain about a bit of noise. This should be limited to about the sound of being in the center between 4 jet-engines running at full power, but should last only about 4.3 seconds. The ear ringing might last a week or two.

Ofcourse our research isn't complete yet. We are still working on the radiation protection of the robot, finding the cheapest sunblock creme isn't that easy. But we expect to be ready to launch around newyear 2009.

Re:

[Brett Buck]

Its CHICKEN FEED for this type of mission. You can't even buy a launch for $30 million, never mind develop and manufacture a lander. It'll be the most expensive $30 million you ever got.

        Brett

Re:$30,000,000 is a lot

[julesh]

You can't even buy a launch for $30 million, never mind develop and manufacture a lander.

I beg to differ. You can buy a human-safe launch, stay on the ISS, and return to Earth for $30m. You can get a lift to LEO with an LM-2C for $20m [spaceref.com].

Re:

[evanbd]

And you can get to LEO for $7M to $8.5M on a Falcon 1 [spacex.com].

Re:

[aldousd666]

The idea isn't to do this for the sake of the prize, even the X prize cost more to get the first time than it actually rewarded. The idea is to use the contest to fuel research and a huge publicity factory for the companies involved in the competition. I for one, think it's a good idea. Much better than raising my taxes to fund it centrally.

Re:$30,000,000 is a lot

[Rei]

Prizes work great on the low-budget front, but not so great on the high budget front. On the low-budget front, you have a far wider pool of idealistic individuals who can individually or collectively afford it, plus a lot of businesses which see it as a way to buy publicity. When you get to the sort of budgets that lunar missions require, both of these sources of money essentially disappear. Instead, you're subject to the government and Wall Street. The government, by the nature of the prize, is automatically ruled out. Wall Street doesn't like to throw money on projects that promises a small chance of getting only a portion of your invested costs paid back.

In short, this isn't going anywhere, and Google knows it. Sure, it doesn't hurt to offer the prize. It's essentially free publicity for Google.

Re:

[aldousd666]

true enough, but the publicity alone might cost more than $30,000,000 if you tried to get the same hype. Maybe not though, it's possible the Associated Press would be all the publicity you'd need.

Re:

[AeroIllini]

I agree with your premise that fewer entrepreneurs would be participating in a high-cost mission, but I don't think the cost of this mission falls into that category.

Most of the expense of the mission will be launch costs ($20m+). These can be easily purchased from one of the many companies that offer it, like Sea Launch, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, etc. The cost of developing the robot itself, which is what this contest is really trying to spur research on, is much lower, and enters the same tier as th

Re:

[Rei]

Explain to me how you plan to get to the moon on a $20m+ launcher. The lightest Falcon 9 is $35m, and it's iffy if you could pull it off with that. Got any launchers cheaper than the Falcons?

Re:

[ichigo 2.0]

How about developing one?

If it was possible to land a probe on the moon for less than $30 million, then what would be the point in this competition? Google could do it themselves, and get much more PR for that. Who knows, maybe there's someone out there who could do it for $25 million, but hasn't had the funding. Until now.

Re:

[jpop32]

Got any launchers cheaper than the Falcons?

Sure. Probably all of them, 7 years from now. :-) The probability of world economy tanking aside, it's reasonable to assume that launches will cost less 7 years from now.

Besides, could you get away with something even lighter than Falcon9? You can get 750kg to LEO for $7-$8 mil today, on Falcon 1. From LEO, would it be possible to use an ion drive to get to Moon orbit? I don't know if delta-v needed to get there is achievable with an ion drive in realistic time-fra

Re:

[VENONA]

Plus, few people are going to call Google how lame Google Moon was/is. For people that want to index all the world's knowledge, this thing is shallow. I'm sure there must be good databases of lunar images and other data, just as there is for asteroids, various biology databases, etc.

From there, you can go off into discussions about the Deep Web, the Semantic Web, etc. IMHO, Google is a *long* way from that stated goal, which is something fundamentally impossible (how do you deal with literally innumerable d

Re:

[Dan D.]

Interestingly for the price of one or two cruise missiles you could run a few of these $30mil competitions and *lower* your taxes.

Re:

[ichigo 2.0]

Not really [wikipedia.org]. One cruise missile costs $1.3 million. But I agree with the spirit of your post.

Re:

[falconwolf]

The idea isn't to do this for the sake of the prize, even the X prize cost more to get the first time than it actually rewarded. The idea is to use the contest to fuel research and a huge publicity factory for the companies involved in the competition. I for one, think it's a good idea. Much better than raising my taxes to fund it centrally.

Aboslutely!

Falcon

Re:

[falconwolf]

Its CHICKEN FEED for this type of mission. You can't even buy a launch for $30 million, never mind develop and manufacture a lander. It'll be the most expensive $30 million you ever got.

I don't think anyone realistically expects the prize to pay for it, but it gives people some motivation. Anyone who does it is liable to come out with some money making patents or opportunities. Someone like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic can offer vacations on the moon to the wealthy. They've already got more than

Re:

[mithridatesVIEupator]

Not only will companies design rovers in time for the prize, they already have without it: http://www.diamandis.com/blastoff.html [diamandis.com] "After a lot of arguments and negotiations, mostly with Marsha Goodstein (the President of idealab! then Bill's girlfriend and now his wife), we reached an agreement. They agreed that BlastOff would put the money into those 3 entities after BlastOff had raised in excess of $20M. So I joined the BlastOff team which at that point consisted of a team of 18 world-class engineers wo

Re:

[clarkkent09]

The key words here are "privately funded organization". Its not about landing a robot on the moon, its about encouraging non-governmental space exploration

Re:$30,000,000 is a lot

[Weslee]

It costs billions to put those guys on Mars.
Heck, it costs NASA billions to put them on the moon.

The point is to have private industry be able to do it for millions, or less.

Its not "Its been done before", its to make it possible to do it again, and again, and again.
Do it without putting the whole country into a deficit.

Make that possible, and then maybe the impossible that costs trillions can use the same technology.

A hand-made car, only a few can afford.
Mass-produced cars, we all can afford.

Get the space technology to that level, and finally we'll be able to really explore outside our planet.

Re:

[eln]

To this point, private industry has barely managed to get to the edges of space, much less into orbit. Getting all the way to the moon, landing, and sending data back would be a huge step forward for private industry, and it will cost far more than $30 million to get there.

Re:

[Nyeerrmm]

Doing it for something on the order of $30 million is an achievement, same as the Ansari X-Prize wasn't about doing something new, but doing it for cheap without government involvement.

Given the investments of participants from the last one, where Scaled Composites spent $20 Million for a $10 Million prize, I'd expect that if someone does this, it will be for less than $100 million. I would guess that to be able to get a capable robot to the moon would require a launch vehicle on the order of the Falcon 9,

Re:

[Nyeerrmm]

Cool, yeah, me and my roommate just sat down and figured out that it could work (4:1 mass ratio for a chemical rockets, 1:1 for an EP booster, both from LEO, based on an old project), so if you can pull off ~100 kg you could do a falcon 1 for a chemical system, and you could make a monster, closer to 300 kg if you're willing to take a while with an electric thruster.

Of course, then you get to the robot that's that small and capable, which I don't know as much about it. From what I understand, the point is

its alot, but big business stands to make more.

[ttapper04]

The point is that you would be achieving this goal through the private sector, a major leap indeed for civilization. The exploration of space may turn from a government driven endeavor to an economic one. If there is money to be made then the means are a consequence of or capitalist system. Google is acting as a catalyst in this situation, providing an artificial economic incentive to speed things up.

Re:

[MontyApollo]

You would have to bring a man back home, which makes it much more complicated and expensive. Just getting a robot there is a big achievement for a private company. I think Bigelow is the only one that's even putting stuff in orbit.

Re:Man

[dradler]

You would have to bring a man back home, ...

Says who? I nominate George Bush, with a second flight (to prove it wasn't just a fluke success) carrying Dick Cheney.

leaving a man on the moon

[falconwolf]

You would have to bring a man back home, ...

Says who? I nominate George Bush, with a second flight (to prove it wasn't just a fluke success) carrying Dick Cheney.

I second that, all in favor signify by saying Ay.

Falcon

Re:Just one question.

[gzerphey]

They just got themselves an airstrip that will cost them 1.3 million dollars a year [slashdot.org] just so they would not have to deal with airport traffic and your worried about a measly $30,000,000 for a contest that stands a good chance of not being won by the deadline?

They seem to hemorrhage money sometimes.

Re:

[Harmonious Botch]

He's got a point; it is hardly a troll. Mods, wanna correct this?

Re:

[Nyeerrmm]

$30 million isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, so, if someone wins it, their name is attached to a big news story with lots of good karma, something that no amount of advertising dollars can buy. And if no one wins, they don't have to pay much of anything. Don't underestimate the value of those -50 evil points.

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Well, it is not bloody likely that they will ever pay out, so they can probably insure the payout at Lloyds for a dollar or two.

Re:Just one question.

[UbuntuDupe]

Because once they have the design for the rover, it's easy to mod to include a dye for moon dust, and then Google will send the modded one up to draw Google's logo on the moon. *please mod informative*

Easy, they don't pay

[iamlucky13]

I think the odds of this being won in the next 20 years (and they only have 5 years to do this) are pretty small. This is similar to Branson's prize he's offering for removing CO2 from the atmosphere at some rather significant rate; the challenge to be surpassed in meeting the qualifications are high enough that there is little chance of having to make a payout.

If they do have to make a payout, the publicity is huge, and it's certainly possible that they have some commercial return in mind...perhaps rights to the rover design. I think the field of contenders will be small and weak, because the challenge is significant and the prize amount is unlikely to match the cost. At least for the original X-prize there was a hypothesized market for system developed as a result.

Of course, if I'm going to say this on Slashdot, I'd better be prepared to back it up:

The guidelines [googlelunarxprize.org] are that it must soft-land on the moon by the end of 2012, roam 500+ meters, and send back video and pictures. The basic prize is $20 million. If it can be done by 2014, the prize is $15 million. There is an additional $5 million if a second lander (by any competitor) to land by 2014. There is a bonus $5 million for extra duties like roaming 5000+ meters, photographing existing man-made objects on the moon, surviving the 14 day lunar night, or discovering water-ice.

The requirements and bonus objectives are roughly inline with the design parameters of the Mars Exploration Rovers. I'm sure a private group can build a device with that kind of capabilities for less than $30 million. However, I'm positive they can't get it to the moon for that little.

Landing a meaningful payload on the moon requires a fairly decent-sized launch vehicle. If we assume a mass similar to the old Surveyor Lunar landers, which were about 1/3 as heavy as the MER's (landing mass, not mobile mass) and not mobile, then we can start looking at launch vehicles capable of sending it on it's way.

The Surveyors were launched on Atlas-Centaur rockets, which have an LEO payload of about 5000 pounds. There isn't anything directly comparable currently on the market. There's few offerings that are too small. A Falcon 1 ($8 million, 1500 pounds) won't cut it. A Falcon 9, on the other hand would be significant overkill, with 21,000 pound LEO capacity and a $35 million price tag.

A Russian Dnepr would probably be the best bet. These converted ICBM's are what Bigelow hired to launch his two prototype inflatable modules with. It has an 8000 pound LEO capacity and costs $15-20 million.

So you're left with $5-10 million (because the last $5 million are only available to a second mission) to develop and build the rover (piece of cake), but also a reliable landing platform and an earth departure stage. The latter can probably be adapted from existing upper stage products, but the first two are being done from scratch.

I just can't imagine that much work being accomplished, even with heavy use of volunteer labor, for that price.

However, if somebody out there has got the money to front and wants a mechanical engineer to work for peanuts part time on such a nerdy project, the above doesn't mean I'm not interested.

Re:

[FleaPlus]

The Surveyors were launched on Atlas-Centaur rockets, which have an LEO payload of about 5000 pounds. There isn't anything directly comparable currently on the market. There's few offerings that are too small. A Falcon 1 ($8 million, 1500 pounds) won't cut it. A Falcon 9, on the other hand would be significant overkill, with 21,000 pound LEO capacity and a $35 million price tag.

It's too bad SpaceX decided to cancel the Falcon 5, which would've been closer to the needed sweet spot.

I suppose another alternati

Re:

[operagost]

These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special!

That's easy. One is a rock band, the other is Lando Calrissian's favorite malt liquor.

Re:

[Rei]

Helium-3 is not key in fusion reactions. It is usable in only two of the many possible second-generation reactions. We'll be lucky to have a commercial first-generation fusion power plant by 2050. And no, that's not an exaggeration; check out ITER's development timeline for when they think they'll have the first fusion power plant providing power to the public, assuming that everything goes just right and that it can somehow be economical.

Re:While you're there, look for Helium-3

[LionMage]

Actually, what the (confused) person meant was, there are people out there scheming to mine Helium-3 from the moon and return it to earth for use in specially designed reactors. The appeal is that fusion of He3 releases virtually no by-products, so a company running a fusion reactor running solely on He3 wouldn't have to periodically replace parts due to the reactor itself becoming radioactive from low-level particle bombardment.

There was actually a rather informative documentary on the Science Channel rec

Re:

[Rei]

If He3 grew in little balloons on trees, we still wouldn't be making reactors from it now because the Coulomb barrier is too high. The only benefit you get from burning it is low neutronicity, and that's not that big of a deal. You can breed He3 here if you really needed to; our current He3 supply, which is more than we really need, comes from the tritium in nuclear warheads. Tritium can decay to He3, and tritium is bred from lithium.

I've not only read the Wikipedia article, but I helped write it long, l

Re:

[Rei]

Yes, there's a lot of hype. The simple facts of the case are the fact that it's a second-generation fuel when we don't even have first generation fuels working yet. This means that it's much harder to burn. And the only benefit you get from that is low neutronicity. It's far from even the only second generation fuel -- it's just the only one that people can use to justify trips to the moon, and thus it gets lots of hype. Might as well go p-B fusion if you're going to deal with that kind of Coulomb barr

Re:

[LionMage]

Ummm... if you actually read the Wikipedia article you cited, you'd see that He3 fusion reactions have almost zero reaction byproducts. Perhaps you were confused by the subsequent section in the Wikipedia entry explaining that He3 is key for use in neutron detectors (i.e., devices that detect neutrons). He3 is not radioactive, and therefore does not emit neutrons (or any other particle).

Re:A colosal waste

[taustin]

The Apollo program has paid for itself at least a hundred times over, in direct economic benefits, by creating entire new industries, and spawning more new technology than you can imagine, much of which is used in every day life.

http://www.ethicalatheist.com/docs/benefits_of_space_program.html [ethicalatheist.com]

http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html [thespaceplace.com]

http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html [nasa.gov]

http://www.fas.org/news/usa/2000/usa-001012.htm [fas.org]

http://www.look-to-the-skies.com/space_program_spinoffs.htm [look-to-the-skies.com]

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9811/02/space.medical/index.html [cnn.com]

And on and on and on.

Re:A colosal waste

[Rei]

As a percentage of our national budget, NASA's $16-17B per year is pretty trivial. Then factor in that they do a lot of research for the military, and another chunk is much more general research, often materials science, biology, and aircraft-related (remember, it's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The big eye catching projects like the shuttle are just a fraction of what NASA does with what is just a tiny fraction of the US's 3 trillion dollar annual budget.