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The Google Lunar X Prize’s Race to the Moon Is Over. Nobody Won
- terravion 9y agoI think there's still a private race to the moon. Some companies, notably, Astrobotic and Moon Express still seem set on getting there and have business models even though they dropped out of the Google contest. http://robohub.org/glxp-update-penn-state-lunar-lions-now-in-3-spot/ http://robohub.org/glxp-update-penn-state-lunar-lions-now-in...
- fouc 9y agoSad.. I always thought that the most innovative method for winning the space X prize would involve blasting many tiny robots to the moon, perhaps using balloon assisted launch.
- votepaunchy 9y agoThe spacecraft was also required to travel 500 meters and transmit high-def video back to earth.
- CapitalistCartr 9y agoI always thought someone would put a tiny rover, perhaps a couple of kg, there and make it work. Using non-space-rated electronics, and making it up on the shielding is pretty risky, not NASA style but I figured for sure someone would roll the dice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jostmey 9y agoIf you were going to spend the enormous amount of money required to send something to the moon, you'd probably use space-rated electronics. I'm guessing the electronics make up a minuscule fraction of the cost, so why risk a super expensive mission to save a relatively small amount of money?
- CapitalistCartr 9y agoNot money; weight and time. Working with off-the-shelf components is much faster, and usually weighs less. Shielding is basically fancy foil; it weighs precious little. I used to wrap components in the Air Force and the rule was don't exceed three layers when touching it up.
- sigstoat 9y agohow would it make sense to boost more mass all the way to the moon to save on electronics cost? you can get rad hardened FPGAs, custom ICs aren't necessary.
- fouc 9y agoOr transmit high-def video back to earth from over an area of 500 meters. ( I always assumed the 'traveled' part was fungible )
- jpm_sd 9y agoThe X Prizes have a fairly lousy track record so far. Disappointing, and rather damning for the "moonshot" approach to innovation (as opposed to good old fashioned incremental engineering)
- euyyn 9y agoWhich have already ended, and what came out of them?
- jpm_sd 9y agoSpace & automotive: one-offs that have not resulted in any production follow-ons https://ansari.xprize.org/ https://ansari.xprize.org/ https://auto.xprize.org/ https://auto.xprize.org/ Ocean tech: incremental improvements to devices that were already in production https://oceanhealth.xprize.org/ https://oceanhealth.xprize.org/ https://oilcleanup.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://tricorder.xprize.org/ https://sensing.xprize.org/ https://sensing.xprize.org/ Genomics: canceled because "outpaced by innovation" https://genomics.xprize.org/ https://genomics.xprize.org/
- melling 9y ago"...as opposed to good old fashioned incremental engineering" There was no opportunity cost. You can have both.
- taneq 9y agoTurns out no-one has $200 million to spend on winning $20 million. Weird.
- fiblye 9y agoSeriously, that's a laughably low "prize". If you could make it to the moon for < $20 million, the US government would have military bases there for cheaper than it costs to build a single fighter jet.
- apendleton 9y agoI agree that this is a low amount, but I don't think the goal of a program like this is necessarily to fully pay for the cost of the project. After all, the winner hopefully has a useful asset at the end of it (a spacecraft, or self-driving car, or whatever else). I think it's more of a subsidy: "if you were thinking about designing a spaceship, here's a way to get it done for $20 million cheaper."
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago"Prizes are useful in bringing credibility to an industry, inspiring entrepreneurs and investors, and attracting new customers to an industry. Both the aviation and space benefited from the Orteig and Ansari X prizes. 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." http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/05/20/tale-prizes/ http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/05/20/tale-prizes/
- melling 9y agoThere are a lot of X Prizes. Many, like the lunar prize, are not dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation 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.
- Retric 9y agoLaunching a rocket capable of getting even a penny into space is dangerous. Reasonable precautions can mitigate those risks, but these things are not toys.
- melling 9y agoLook these are long discussions. Here's the one we had 3 years ago. You even chimed in. No one said they were toys. Should we just stay at home? You didn't think so 3 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Are Turing_Machine and JoeAltmaier still around?
- alexnewman 9y agoJust in time for the falcon heavy. The first rocket i can remember where I can go to website and pay for a lunar transfer
- robin_reala 9y agoSpace Adventures have been advertising a lunar mission for a decade or so on Soyuz, they just needed two people willing to split the cost. http://www.spaceadventures.com/experiences/circumlunar-mission/ http://www.spaceadventures.com/experiences/circumlunar-missi...
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoThe cost given is ~"it depends, contact us" (ie they don't give a cost).
- robin_reala 9y agoPresumably anything like this is going to be POA, but originally they were quoting about 150m: http://www.businessinsider.com/space-adventures-moon-launch-2016-1?r=US&IR=T&IR=T/#since-launching-businessman-dennis-tito-up-to-the-international-space-station-iss-in-2001-space-adventures-has-been-the-only-company-to-send-private-citizens-to-space-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/space-adventures-moon-launch-...
- jk4930 9y agoI work with a former GLXP team (PTScientists from Germany). We left the prize in early 2017 and will launch in 2019. We're actually grateful for the GLXP. It opened doors, it did spread the word and created a community, it forced us to push through to meet deadlines. We had to develop business models (the prize itself wouldn't cover the costs) and adopt a professional mindset while not losing the hacker approach. And while nobody won the prize, the primary goal (kickstarting an ambitious private space industry) was accomplished. 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
- boltzmannbrain 9y agoSeconded. I worked with Astrobotic (https://www.astrobotic.com https://www.astrobotic.com) while at CMU, and many of us have the GLXP to thank for becoming better engineers and leaders.
- boltzmannbrain 9y agoThrowback to the milestone prizes we won in 2015: https://twitter.com/theAlexLavin/status/560103792805306369 https://twitter.com/theAlexLavin/status/560103792805306369
- wgolsen 9y agoWhat years? I visited Dr. Whittaker and David Gump in ~2010 to present an analysis of their business plan. At the time I was thoroughly impressed with the tech/team and equally unimpressed with the business case Gump had made. I hope things have progressed since then because I'd love to see (some iteration of) the lander I touched actually reaching the lunar surface. 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.
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- knowaveragejoe 9y agoFrom an idealistic standpoint, I'm disappointed. It sucks seeing one of the few "highly" visible efforts on this front "failing". From an realistic, utilitarian standpoint, I can understand why this happened.
- jasonhansel 9y ago> "Many now believe [landing on the moon] is no longer the sole purview of a few government agencies, but now may be achieved by small teams of entrepreneurs, engineers, and innovators from around the world." 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.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoIt isn't like $20M is killing the balance sheets at Google. It seems silly that they wouldn't just leave it out there "indefinitely" until it was claimed.
- mLuby 9y agoThese prizes should be left to automatically compound interest/investment until they're claimed.
- elif 9y agoTrue, that would strengthen the business case for participants in subsequent competitions.
- ben_w 9y agoDisagree. What’s the management cliché? SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Assignable, Relevant/Realistic, Time-bound. Without a time constraint, most people[citation needed] keep putting things off until later.
- Already__Taken 9y agoPlus if you decide to issue another, similar prize. People know then had better get on with it.
- wyldfire 9y agoIn general, you are absolutely correct. But with competitive pressure it might be different.
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago>The foundation raised the possibility of a new sponsor or continuing the competition without any cash prizes. 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?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- osense 9y agoSince there seem to be some people from the industry around, I’d like to ask: how are we doing with writing software for such safety-critical systems? Do we still use C and try to have it statically verified by various tools? Write the software multiple times and have instances of the functionally same systems running in parallel, Andy see if they agree on which action should be taken? Can dependent and/or linear types help?
- plafl 9y agoI'm not sure for space, for aircraft it's usually C or Ada and lot's of testing. Sometimes Scada. I have not seen static analysis applied. You could use any language of your choosing but you then would need to demonstrate test coverage on the generated machine code, which you could avoid maybe by using a certified C compiler. I would expect space applications to have less stringent requirements, unless human lifes are involved.
- osense 9y agoIt seems unfortunate to have to run tests at all, all the more running them on the generated machine code. What about having to satisfy some real-time guarantees? Is this checked by tests as well?
- plafl 9y agoI think, but not remember too well, that tests and some human analysis can suffice. But in the end there is testing, more tests and whole teams dedicated to testing.
- starik36 9y agoI interviewed at SpaceX and asked them what they use to write code that runs in the rocket. It's all plain C and everything must be declared before hand - in other words, there are no dynamic allocations anywhere in the code.
- skgoa 9y ago
- DaniFong 9y agowe're just going to have to go ourselves.
- dnautics 9y agoWell at least no one seems to be sour over it, unlike the cancellation of the genomics x prize, which really ticked off several of the entrants. Whoever was running that one should be embarrassed.
- supervillain 9y agoInstead of going to the Moon, why not just create a self-sustaining vehicle that can allow humans to survive sustainably in any terrain, desert, forests, mountains, land, sea, lake or water. On soil, above or underwater. And make it a race prize competition similar to Google Lunar X Prize Race.
- z3t4 9y agoI think the biggest problem is radio communication !?
- avmich 9y agoThe biggest problem - maybe 90% of the task - is to get there. Then from the remainder the biggest problem - in terms of required mass - is radio communication (if you choose radio). At least that's what my analysis was giving me.
- z3t4 9y agoI think getting there is a question of how many canisters you can fill with gas and water. I think it would be fairly cheap if you have small enough payload. A quick calculation: You would need to fill up around 25,000 pipes and have 160 stages.
- avmich 9y agoOne of the best approaches, IMO, was Cringely teams' with multiple attempts.