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Any way to "hack" the Google Lunar X Prize?
Warning: This question is likely so stupid that I'm going to wish I had posted it anonymously to avoid ridicule, but what the hell :)
I find the subject of space exploration and colonization fascinating, but the incredible costs for access to space seem to be a nearly-insurmountable obstacle to true progress in these areas. I've recently become interested in the Google Lunar X Prize and started looking at the teams who are competing. While these teams are probably going to accomplish some amazing things, I suspect they're going to do it on the back of tens of millions in funding...is that truly the only way?
I guess my question is something like this: is there any theoretical way to win something like the Lunar X Prize for $1 million? $100k? $10k?
Here are some ridiculous thoughts that I've had:
1. Using high-altitude balloons to cut down on launch costs.
2. Going small. Very small. Like a pound or two for the rover. Maybe smaller.
3. Getting the cost low enough that you can launch multiple missions, knowing that most will fail.
4. Travel to the moon over a period of months...would this reduce launch difficulty?
I'm sure I'm probably missing the scale of the problem here, and perhaps the simple laws of physics dictate that there's no cheap solution that we know of yet. Or is there?
- ph0rque 18y agoNot a stupid question at all. I remember Cringely writing something about hacking that particular prize, as well... I'll add a link once I find it.
- ph0rque 18y agoThis is the link, although you'd have to go back a couple to get the beginning of the story: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080530_004991.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080530_0049...
- streety 18y agoThat's a little disappointing. It starts out well: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070927_003043.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070927_0030... http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071214_003618.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071214_0036... Then goes downhill: http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=4718 http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=4718 . . . and culminating in the link your posted. They could really do with pointing a few more links to their website: http://www.teamcringely.org/ http://www.teamcringely.org/
- brentpenman 18y agoWhat's the breakdown of costs... my intuition is that the biggest number is from launch (especially fuel) but am I wrong?
- mindviews 18y agoYes, the launch is the real cost driver for space economics. Launch costs alone are in the neighborhood of $10,000/kg for large American providers and somewhat less in other providers/countries. I believe no one has come close to the $1,000/kg mark yet. Because launch is so expensive, people then spend a lot more money making sure the payloads are ultra-reliable (launching a replacement is just too expensive). Because costs are so high, there isn't enough business to really get good economies of scale (yet...go SpaceX!) - so a lot of money goes into design and testing of new rockets that will only see 10-100 units built. As for launch itself, fuel is pretty cheap - turbopumps are expensive. It is the high-precision machining of parts that ends up costing you. If you can reuse the hardware, then you get savings for future launches and everyone is happy.
- gravitycop 18y agothe breakdown of costs... my intuition is that the biggest number is from launch (especially fuel) The fuel cost for any given launch is virtually zero. http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/fuel_costs.html http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/fuel_costs.html
- RKlophaus 18y agoHad the privilege of hearing a presentation by Brian Binnie, the test pilot for Scaled Composites (http://scaled.com http://scaled.com) shortly before they won Ansari XPrize back in 2004. His description of their team sounded like the ultimate group of hackers. And his description of their process sounded exactly like the questions you ask above... discarding all preconceived notions, how do we make this happen in the cheapest, simplest way possible? He also advised that teams adopt a mantra of "Question, don't defend." In other words, it's more important to realize that something is wrong and get it fixed than to assign blame or respect egos.
- zain 18y agoI had a crazy idea too, and I'll probably get ridiculed, but what the hell. I think it is fairly straightforward to get something tiny to the moon. The challenge comes in making it broadcast back to earth. For wireless transmissions, you need considerable bulk and you add a lot of cost. Wouldn't it be cool if, instead, it was connected to earth by a ridiculously long insulated wire? Then you might even be able to cut down the size to well under a pound for the rover itself (not including the fuel needed to get there). It shouldn't have problems transmitting as long as the wire is insulated well enough, right? Some back-of-a-napkin calculations lead me to believe that you wouldn't need more than 60 cubic miles to store enough wire to reach the moon (200,000 miles long, 1 inch thick). what do you think? flame away :)
- brentpenman 18y agoI think there'd be a problem with extreme temperature conditions as well as the fact that the moon is not in geosynchronous orbit
- colinake 18y agoSo IF you could find a wire long enough and insulated enough, how would your wire deal with the rotation of the earth? :)
- youngnh 18y agothe trans-equatorial railway express, of course, ol chap! but, uh, (slightly) more seriously, if one big transmitter is the problem, then isn't the solution multiple small transmitters in the the same orbit, repeated at increasingly closer-to-earth orbits? then you could just run a wire up to a transmitter in geostationary orbit.
- Mystalic 18y agoSounds like the space elevator. The problem's that the moon and earth move back and forth too far, and space debris would kill it. You need a string made out of nano-carbon or another material harder than diamond.
- gravitycop 18y ago
- tiki12revolt 18y agoEmploying high-altitude balloons to cut down on launch costs is potential feasible, as traditional launches can run into the tens of thousands of dollars (or more) per lb. One potential problem with going small on the rover end is that the prize stipulates that the rover must travel a prescribed distance on the lunar surface, and going too small will make traversing distance a much greater obstacle that it already is. Additionally, how would one power the antenna necessary to communicate with earth (I am thinking specifically of battery power only, and I think it would in and of itself weigh more than a pound)?
- gravitycop 18y agotraditional launches can run into the tens of thousands of dollars (or more) per lb. $8.90/lb. http://neverworld.net/truax http://neverworld.net/truax http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429099
- tiki12revolt 18y agoassuming we take SpaceX on their word, that the "Falcon 1 is the world’s lowest cost per flight to orbit of a production rocket", and take the cost and payload weight right of the website, then for a 1010 kg payload at $9.1M, that works out to be roughly, $4095 / lb. from: http://www.spacex.com/falcon1.php http://www.spacex.com/falcon1.php
- gravitycop 18y agoEmploying high-altitude balloons to cut down on launch costs is potential feasible How would high-altitude balloons reduce launch costs?
- stcredzero 18y agoNot by much. Most of the energy cost of a launch to Earth orbit involves getting to orbital velocity. Getting an object that high is pretty easy by comparison. (Get out your physics textbook and compare the kinetic energy of something going Mach 24 to the potential energy of something dropping 100 km.) I'd expect a mistake like this from a high school student or a freshman. If you're not clear about this, then you have a perhaps a bit of homework to do before posting questions about space to a social news site that prides itself on informed, intelligent discussion. Perhaps start with Zubrin's _Entering Space_. Any number of books about the space program will do as well.
- mkn 18y agoIf your rovers were small enough, you might be able to make a gun-launched or gun-assisted scheme work. If you could engineer your probe/launch vehicle to withstand 20 Gs, for example, a linear acceleration at that level would get you to Mach 1.2ish in 400 meters or so. You come out of the barrel cleanly in ramjet territory and, what's better past the point where your shock wave angles are highly dependent on Mach number. You could start out in subcritical mode for the engine and progress through critical and supercritical, buying hardware simplicity with some loss of efficiency. You might even be able to shed some of the diffuser cowling in stages at the lip for a Q&D variable geometry engine. By the tme you hit M = 5-7, you'd probably be out of the atmosphere and would have to switch to rocket mode anyhow. Your mass fraction for the booster stage would be pretty amazing because you'd shaved 2000-2500 m/s off your delta-V with the gun/air-breathing phase. (That matters a lot to the rocket equation. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the actual benefit.) The limiting factors here are obtaining a guidance and control system that is small enough to fit down your (admittedly large bore) low-pressure launch gun. Also, your gun would have to be pretty dang straight or your vehicle would have to be wrapped in a vibration-absorbing sabot. The benefits are: 1) Once you have the gun, you can launch as many as you like; 2) Mass fraction as mentioned above; 3)The possibility of production-lining launch vehicle construction. Not that I've given this any thought. BTW, Bruckner et. al. at the University of Washington have been working on a ram accelerator, a type of launch gun, for years. The only thing slowing them is funding. They omit an airbreathing stage in favor of obtaining all the Delta-V in one shot, subjecting the payload to 700-1e3 Gs.
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoYea, building a massive electromagnetic riffle along the slope of a mountain in a third world country to repeatedly launch vehicles into space has been on my todo list since i first read "the moon is a harsh mistress."
- JabavuAdams 18y agoWorked out great for Gerald Bull
- froo 18y ago
- mhb 18y agoMore accessible challenges can be found here, including a tether for a space elevator and an astronaut glove. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442634 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442634
- ivankirigin 18y agoYou can't broadcast from something that only weighs a pound or two. The launch is by far the most expensive part, so going multiple trips isn't really an option. The folks who won the Urban Grand Challenge have a great approach: http://astrobotictechnology.com/ http://astrobotictechnology.com/ http://www.youtube.com/user/AstroboticTechnology http://www.youtube.com/user/AstroboticTechnology
- froo 18y agoThis might sound strange, but instead of radio broadcasts, what about the possibility of doing broadcasts with bursts of light utilising lasers? I guess my thought is based off the old idea that you could intercept data off a modem by reading its LED at some considerable distance - and just upscaling it with more powerful tech. http://applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf http://applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf I realise that it would be near impossible to have the Earth visually see the transmission on a consistent basis, so what about a satellite in earth's orbit that essentially matched the moon's orbit, creating some kind of relay station.
- gravitycop 18y agowhat about a satellite in earth's orbit that essentially matched the moon's orbit L1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
- ivankirigin 18y agodoesn't it also have to move? and isn't the point to make some progress in spacefaring?
- gravitycop 18y agoit would be near impossible to have the Earth visually see the transmission on a consistent basis How do you figure?
- jws 18y agoOr better yet, use a passive element on the moon side. There are optical reflectors up there from moon missions that people can bounce (large) earth based lasers off of. Imagine one of those with a single LCD film over it. You can then selectively polarize the reflected light at virtually zero power use. It won't be a fast bit rate, the LCD could to 100bps easily, but I wonder what the atmospheric scattering does to the wavefront.
- cvg 18y agoWhat if we rethought the design of the "rover" to make it smaller and the whole launch mass less? I don't think there's a requirement for a four or even three wheel rover. Instead, we could use a clear double inflatable ball with an instrument package and a motor inside. This allows for a < 10lb/5kg rover. We could pack dozens of these in several rockets to the moon. Redundancy would be in our favor. Kind of like moving from big-iron servers to farms. This is my inspiration for the double inflatable ball: http://www.hammacher.com/publish/72182.asp http://www.hammacher.com/publish/72182.asp
- trapper 18y agoHigh altitude balloons are great fun. I am working on a rocket launch mechanism for one in my spare time. Costs are really low. http://www.hobbyspace.com/NearSpace/index.html http://www.hobbyspace.com/NearSpace/index.html
- JabavuAdams 18y agoJoin the a-rocket mailing list for extremely high SNR discussion: http://www.arocketry.net/forum.html http://www.arocketry.net/forum.html
- JabavuAdams 18y agoThermal protection and heat dissipation will most likely be a hard problem. Getting a lander to survive into the lunar night is a big challenge in its own right. If it can't survive the night, that places other constraints on the mission.
- cool-RR 18y agoWhy is it hard to survive the night? Because of the coldness? Why would the coldness be a problem? Even if the machine couldn't operate in such a low temperature, can't it just hibernate until day?
- JabavuAdams 18y agoSo ... IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist) ... The lunar night is about 2 weeks long. The night-time surface temperature is about -230 C to -150 C. I'm not sure how long it would take a lander to cool down at local sunset, but it might be pretty fast. That kind of cooling can create stresses and actually break mechanical connections or electrical components. It's a lot warmer at about 1 m under the surface, but you have to get there somehow.
- lallysingh 18y agoWell, there's also the subproblem approach: (Note, I'm completely speaking out of my ass) - Launch a string of relays between orbit & the moon. They may only work once a month, but that just means you have to have the judges there that day :-) Each one can be a control board, radio, and solar panel. Swarm satellites, I think they were called, only in a straightish-line. - Make the actual lander dead, dead, dead simple. Like forward & turn-in-reverse RC car simple. Make it small & rugged, but put little/no control electronics onboard. Power (unless you can beam it in from a near-moon satellite into a battery pack -- it's fine to let the rover sit around 29 days, 23 hr, 45 min of the month, to let it charge), and receiver(s) to control the motor(s). - Data transmission could be a controllable mirror, and a relay with a good camera! But I guess this all really depends on another question: what's the cost to weight function? Purely linear? Is it cheaper to do two launches of weight W instead of one launch of weight 2W, over a minimal value for W? If a launcher for a standard size object can be the primary cost of the system, we could launch relays and landers in swarms and leave the big money for the launcher. 10% success rate? Launch 15 to be sure. Also, one situated between three high-altitude balloons would look pretty sweet.
- Tichy 18y agoThere has to be a way, I used to think about this, too... Not sure if balloons get you that far, though. I think mostly you can avoid the friction of the air to some extent, but if I remember correctly, the altitude where you still have air to float a balloon in is only a tiny fraction of the stationary orbit altitude. Just a thought right now: what about nanobots? Perhaps something could be made so tiny that it doesn't even fall down... kind of like a balloon without a balloon. Not sure if it would still be workable without an atmosphere...
- jsmcgd 18y agoYeah unfortunately the altitude isn't really the problem. It's high speeds that you want. The altitude just gets you away from the atmosphere which will stop you achieving the high speeds.
- Tichy 18y agoMaybe since fuel isn't so expensive it isn't such an issue anymore, but I really like the idea of somehow powering a vehicle with solar power. The nice thing about velocity is that without friction, you can get really fast over time even with relatively weak acceleration. No idea whatsoever how to accelerate a rocket with electricity alone, though... Is it even possible? I think NASA has some models, but for long distance stuff...
- jerf 18y agoLookup "Ion Drive". If you end up on a Star Wars site, you've missed; there's a real such thing that has flown in real space. You can't launch on an Ion drive, though. (Even if you made it powerful enough, that would mean irradiating the entire launch area with instantly-lethal radiation, not a terribly social thing to do.) The way to a solar-powered launch is that you use solar power to create the rocket fuel, which in the simplest case is simply cracking water into H and O. Solar panels are orders of magnitude away from being able to launch themselves in real time. Take a solar panel, compute its mass, compute how much energy it can generate in a day, convert that to potential energy in Earth's gravitational field, and you'll get a sense of the maximum speed a panel could possibly rise with perfect conversion of energy to height (which we have no idea how to do anyhow). I haven't done the math but if you get a rise rate of more than a few inches a second during the brightest part of the day I'd be surprised.
- markessien 18y agoIf you really want to attempt this, the correct approach would be to approach the problem from the perspective that gravity is the force you have to defeat. Find a way to reduce this force significantly and you may find a cheap solution. For example, magnets defeat this force. Look for things that can work against gravity even in the absence of air.
- dmoney 18y agoSmaller is probably better. I read something in Forbes (or maybe Fortune Small Business) about a guy who is building small rockets capable of launching things like science experiments and people's ashes into space. He's apparently one of the first clients of Spaceport America. I don't think they were capable of deploying satellites or additional stages, but perhaps a similar design could. Another thing to consider would be having the planetary transmitter be a separate module from the rover, allowing a smaller rover, and a smaller lander. The rover would then just need a less powerful radio. The more powerful transmitter could be landed separately, or even remain in orbit.
- AndersFeder 18y agoMany interesting thoughts here. A few comments: It is very difficult to make a launch vehicle powerful enough of your own. No matter how you do it, you will need a good deal of propellant for lunar transit, descent and landing. This means the launch mass is bound to be relatively high. Also, your launch vehicle has to be capable of reaching orbital velocity (approximately mach 22). Even the best amateur rockets, to my knowledge, have only achieved around a fourth of this velocity, and that is with no payload. Ion drives aren't practical for a mission like this for a number of reasons. For a full discussion of why, please see this article: http://openspacex.org/2008/10/06/escaping-the-grip-of-mother-earth/ http://openspacex.org/2008/10/06/escaping-the-grip-of-mother... If you are interested in having your ideas seriously considered, please consider joining Team FREDNET, an open source team in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Most everyone are welcome: http://www.teamfrednet.org http://www.teamfrednet.org