The Google Lunar X Prize’s Race to the Moon Is Over. Nobody Won
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That said, we still offer payload capacity to the lunar surface and lunar orbit. Since there's not much time left, it should be rather small and nice (think CubeSat format). We provide transportation, energy, communication. Don't be shy, fellow hackers, ask me. Here or under jk at ptscientists.com
My favorite part of this encounter was how convinced I was that my team was teasing me when they insisted Red would tell 'the gorilla story' within 20 minutes of meeting us. Lo and behold, no more than 10 minutes in he tells us about the time he wrestled with a gorilla ('way back before animal rights was a thing'). What a fascinating guy.
- scientific orgs (NASA, universities, etc); I get they'd love to pay for access to lunar surface. Maybe even some imaging from the dark side of the Moon?
- prospecting companies like Deep Space Industries or Planetary Resources.
Beautiful picture.
On the other hand: it's the side of the moon that never receives earthshine. So it's dark in that sense.
$980k (€800k) [1] for the first kg to the lunar surface, for lunar orbit it's less (ask me in private, it's not published). Expect $50k-500k to develop the payload (depends on what it is and who builds it). There are several open source CubeSat designs and kits that give you an idea.
So whether you have a simple payload/business model or a more sophisticated one (more suitable for a later launch probably), contact me better sooner rather than later. Many details need to be cleared early on.
I was just being curious as to who would.
I can imagine some rich people would find it pretty cool to have an urn of their ashes left on the moon.
A million dollars split between 2500 is just $400 each.
Obviously very rough figures but it nothing screams outrageous to me. I'd be surprised if you couldn't fill 2500 of those orders.
Only problem I see is that 0.5 carat cremation diamond is $6000 US, and it would be a "waste" of the ashes since they only use a few ounces (~150g) and a human cremated is roughly 5kg.
BUT, if a person is fine with only sending a portion of their loved one to the moon for the super "low price" of $20k, it would only take 75 to break even, but there is room for a WHOLE lot more.
All GLXP entrants i heard of seem to have planned to make do with exceptionally low LEO insertion mass. Which sometimes made me think of them as vaporware.
But, by challenging people to perform what are essentially stunts, they do not always address the fundamental technologies required to truly move a sector forward. And that can have deadly consequences.
Lindbergh’s flight greatly boosted an accident-prone commercial aviation industry at a time when efforts to improve its safety had barely begun. The accident and death rates increased.
Winning the Ansari X Prize left Rutan and his team over confident in themselves and their technology based on an incomplete flight test program. The result has been four deaths and more than a decade of frustration and broken promises."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation
The entire debate about a particular prize being nothing more than a stunt is a debate that doesn't fit well on HN.
A private group getting to the moon and sending video back, could inspire others, which could get NASA a larger budget, or lead to more VC funding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279
Are Turing_Machine and JoeAltmaier still around?
The legacy of Scaled Composite's air launch approach, aerodynamic re-entry, and piloted design--all fair decisions for a quick daredevil run to space--cost Virgin Galactic and its investors hundreds of millions of dollars. Their delays, overruns and mistake, in turn, made life difficult for SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra, and a handful of other space start-ups. Customers, Congress and investors now had a well-publicized promise, and failure to deliver, in mind.
As for X-Prizes, in general, I think they're a great idea. My blog is http://h4labs.org
I took h4 from the first "X-Prize". H4 was the version of the watch that won the money. It has been explained repeatedly why they're a great idea. Should I rehash it on my blog, because I'm not going to do it here, again?
Btw, it sounds like we might simply be arguing over what's a good "X-Prize"?
Even just building and testing rocks has killed people because they are fucking dangerous. However, so is putting solar panels on people roofs. That does not mean nobody should build rockets, just that safty is a major consideration when building them.
IMO, astronauts are almost irrelevant from an overall safty standpoint. Rocketry has killed more people on the ground than it has people trying to get to space, though this may change over time as we get away from those extremely dangerous early days.
Ex: Just VLS-1 an unmanned rocket killed 21 peopel more than the total number of US astronauts killed so far.
The article compares the Ansari X Prize [1], which Scaled Composites won, to the Orteig Prize [2], which Charles Lindbergh won. It's a statement on the efficiency of prizes, generally, in fostering technological change. Not a complaint abut a specific prize.
The evidence the author collects, across multiple articles and many decades show prize money is better spent on other things. The "inspire others" and "get NASA a larger budget" or "more VC funding" bits don't happen, or don't happen as effectively as if those goals had been directly pursued, e.g. paying for PR, lobbying or actually making the VC investments.
The optimizations made to win the prize rarely translate into broader success. The resulting disappointment(s) and inevitable hype-cycle end can end up doing more damage in the long run.
https://longitudeprize.org/about-us/history
I think you'd have a really hard time raising the money to pay for lobbying to get more research.
I don't condemn prizes as a category.
The Longitude Prize and DARPA's self-driving car competitions were successful. Here's what differentiates them: the people who wanted to buy the product set the rules of the prize to yield something useful to them. The products of the X Prizes either have terrible product-market fit ("market" to be read broadly to include non-commercial users) or pursue the wrong goal (e.g. manned spaceflight crowding out launch-cost reduction, et cetera).
I agree there's a lot of things that can be gotten from it like NASA funding, but many people do not really "know" the utility of going to the moon.
For example, people will talk about mining on the moon, but I've only ever seen articles debunking the utility of this, and not a single in-depth analysis in favor of this. I might be looking in the wrong spots.
My theory is that relatively few people can justify the value of these efforts convincingly. This is part of why NASA doesn't have a bigger budget. "Whitey on the moon"[0] has a ring of truth to it.
Developing strong arguments for further development is one of the most effective ways for people to support further development.
Otherwise you end up with things like "We'll go to Mars for space tourism/exploration!". Which is... well you do what you want with your money, but that's a hell of a lot of money for tourism. Public funding will be hard to come by.
When Lindbergh made his flight, commercial air travel was already 13 years old (not counting Zeppelins) and already growing rapidly. US Airline passengers nearly tripled from 1928 to 1929, from 60,000 to 170,000. That wasn't just because of Lindbergh, it was mostly because of the Ford Tri-motor.
All those passenger flights funded commercial airplane manufacturers to invest in new designs, and by the early 1930s we had far safer and more cost effective metal monoplane designs like the Boeing 247 and DC-2, and then the DC-3s. It was one of the great revolutions in transportation history. So what was so bad about it?
But the comment about Burt Rutan stings; he is the most effective aerospace engineer I can imagine. Said something like
“I don’t design planes, I design flight tests.”
Without a time constraint, most people[citation needed] keep putting things off until later.
It's odd that Google would cite this as the outcome of the Lunar X Prize: if anything, the failure of the Lunar X Prize is strong evidence against this very belief.
The support software underneath (equivalent to the OS kernel, OS libraries, frameworks etc. you would use to run desktop apps) is typically configured in one or more AUTOSAR[1] tools. The exchange format for AUTOSAR is .arxml, which is a horrible adaption of XML. These tools will also take .armxl files as input and generate the source files that contain the standard components, the drivers, the glue code for inter-component communication etc.
Only the software components that are not covered by the AUTOSAR standard or handed down by the car manufacturer as standard components will typically be written by hand, though even for those we will increasingly often write generators in e.g. Python. That's because different versions of the same car, different target plattforms (that is car models) etc. will often use different subsets of features, different internal networking, different messages etc. and since everything has to be set statically before compile time, we need to generate different versions.
TBH I doubt that much of that is open-source. There is a reference implementation of AUTOSAR and there are some code generators that are FOSS as part of the genIVI project. But practically all tools you would actually want to use are closed source and super expensive. That's one of the major reasons why the push for open-sourcing automotive software is not going to lead to anything.
[1] AUTOSAR is an international standard for automotive software architectures and components/APIs/etc. that is aimed at making software modules more or less plug'n'play between different SW vendors, car manufacturers etc. All of this is statically "linked" at generation time! The software will not even compile if things don't match exactly. The first version of a Linux-based Adaptive AUTOSAR that basically works like Android has been released recently, though.
http://robohub.org/glxp-update-penn-state-lunar-lions-now-in...
https://ansari.xprize.org/ https://auto.xprize.org/
Ocean tech: incremental improvements to devices that were already in production https://oceanhealth.xprize.org/ https://oilcleanup.xprize.org/
Medical gadgets that I'm not qualified to comment on, but look pretty meh: https://tricorder.xprize.org/ https://sensing.xprize.org/
Genomics: canceled because "outpaced by innovation" https://genomics.xprize.org/
There was no opportunity cost. You can have both.
And make it a race prize competition similar to Google Lunar X Prize Race.
Can that be read as a possible sign that Google has less cash to spend on such projects nowadays? Are they trying to save the money?
From an realistic, utilitarian standpoint, I can understand why this happened.