Google is backing private moon landing contest | Hacker News Reader

Google is backing private moon landing contest

news.bbc.co.uk

13 pointsjkush14 comments

Awesome. But it costs much more than that to do a soft landing on the moon.

The heat differential from night to day is the hardest engineering part. The launcher from earth is just a matter of money.

From: http://www.solarviews.com/eng/moon.htm

Mean surface temperature (day) 224.6 F Mean surface temperature (night) -243.4 F

Brutal!

> The heat differential from night to day is the hardest engineering part.

Well, aside from getting a significant payload into orbit. ... and getting it to the moon ... and landing it ... and moving around

... and navigating the regulatory maze so you can: ... store, work with, and transport hazardous propellants ... actually do engine tests ... actually do test launches ... transport your test or launch stack across national borders

So, no, not really.

I said it was the hardest, not the only hard part. You didn't say why other things are harder.

Okay, good point. I'm stepping outside my area of expertise, but here's my intuition:

Radiative cooling and thermal isolation seem to be fairly well understood. They can also (unlike many, many other parts of the problem) be tested on Earth. Basically, any satellite needs to deal with this stuff, and designers have been dealing with it for a long while.

Now, if you add lunar dust to the mix, sure, that's a complicating factor, but I don't see it being as bad as some of the other things I mentioned.

Launch vehicles are a service now. If I were to work on this, I wouldn't work on a launch vehicle, just the package that could survive the launch & landing.

Prize money isn't intended to finance people's efforts. Its merely an incentive.

More info here: http://www.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-10/ff_moon

Why is every google story starting to sound like a segment from one of those documentaries about a lottery winner who blows it all?

$30M prize that probably won't get paid till 2012? This doesn't sound like an expensive PR stunt.

Particularly when you consider that:

a) Most likely nobody will be able to claim the prize.

b) $30M is like a rounding error to Google.

c) Google will make $30M in ad revenue in the first two hours after they put up live HD movies from the moon.

All true. I meant more my comment more from a qualitative standpoint.

> a) Most likely nobody will be able to claim the prize.

I'm pretty sure that Armadillo could do it if they decided to. They've spent about $3M to date on their development, but they're attacking a very different problem of (eventually) manned VTVL.

I'm still trying to get my head around how funding for this, and subcontracting / collaboration would work.

heh, I'd like to see Anybot's Dexter bounding around on the moon. "One small step for man..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com