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#80 by apace on 08 Feb, 2011 10:13
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Why you don't take the statement of Musk as it was, as a simply PR answer to a question. I don't think there are real ideas to send two probes to Mars on the same Falcon 9. Alone from the standpoint of risk management is better to use two different lifters, in the overall price of such a mission, the 50M for an additional Falcon 9 is nothing.
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#81 by ugordan on 08 Feb, 2011 10:51
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Exactly. Plus, the discussion is really off topic here.
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#82 by ChefPat on 08 Feb, 2011 11:28
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Exactly. Plus, the discussion is really off topic here.
NO KIDDING!!! -
#83 by bbliss on 09 Feb, 2011 23:49
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I just read this passage in the "rules and regulations" section of the website
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/about-the-prize/rules-and-guidelines:
The competition's grand prize is worth $20 million. To provide an extra incentive for teams to work quickly, the grand prize value will change to $15 million whenever a government-funded mission successfully explores the lunar surface, currently projected to occur in 2013.
Is this new? I seem to remember that the deadlines used to be fixed.
What government-funded mission do they mean? Does NASA have a lander planned for 2013?
The deadlines used to be fixed. See http://www.parabolicarc.com/2010/08/11/teams-angered-proposed-google-lunar-prize
For back-story, prior to about six months ago, the Grand prize was scheduled to decrease in magnitude from $20 million to $15 million at the end of 2012, and then end (expire with no payout) at the end of 2014, seven years after the initial announcement. The X-Prize Foundation then decided to arbitrarily changed the rules three years in, and it took them a while longer still to then finish the rule set. I'm not even sure that the rules are really "finished", even today.
So, this ended up being at least a +$5 million rule change for Astrobotic, if they launch as planned in 2013 and succeed, assuming that they could never have launched by 2012.
If they (or SpaceX) encounter delays of some kind, pushing their launch past December 2013 (not hard to imagine), Astrobotic initially would have received $0 from GLXP. Now, they will still potentially be eligible for $20 million, and it begins to look like a +$15 to +$20 million rules change for them (or any other team that never stood a chance of succeeding by 2014).
You can imagine how difficult fundraising in late 2007 (when the prize was announced) might have been, with a hard 2012/2014 cutoff, for a team with a credible 5-to-6-year timetable to fund, design, build, launch, test, and operate the system.
Keep in mind that this would have been just after the first, fairly catestrophic test of Falcon 1 on Omelek (bleeding fuel through a rusty B-nut) followed by a failure of the stage separation on the second test (when fuel slosh at altitude was ignored).
Making a 5-year gamble on an unproven Falcon 1, much less a (then paper) Falcon 9, much less a (still paper) stretched Falcon 1E, would have been a hard sell to investors looking to actually win the prize. The next-closest-priced launch option, for realistically-sized systems, would have been a Russian Dnepr at $18 million - $25 million, significantly decreasing the payout-to-investment ratio, and getting worse every month with the sinking dollar.
Teams that would have stood a realistic chance at success (and there have never been very many) but requiring a payout exceeding launch and fabrication costs would likely not have even competed at all under those terms, particularly as the rules changes concerning scope needed to win kept coming all through 2008, with no hint of permanent resolution any time soon. Only teams with significant funding that was independent of success or failure (such as guaranteed academic funding from CMU, PR deals, a wealthy donor/benefactor, etc.) would have been able to even *get* to the rules changes in August 2010.
Maybe an adroit investor could have predicted the rules change when it became pretty clear that no team could actually claim the prize by 2012, or maybe the GLXP/XPF people wanted teams who would build better business plans and/or be willing to endure a likely net loss. Maybe Larry and Sergey will do whatever it takes to prevent the prize(s) from expiring without being claimed. It's hard to know.
Personally, I wish they'd published a complete, hard rule set to begin with, and stuck to it. I think changing the rules halfway through is a poor way to run a contest, even one of this kind, and makes me wonder what the other X-Prize competitors have endured. -
#84 by Robotbeat on 16 Feb, 2011 19:13
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At least in this video, they are using an Arduino microcontroller package to boot up the Astrobotic rover when the Sun rises:
I love Arduinos.
So cheap (the board they show cost $30 or less fully integrated) and easy to use! (and already flown in space, I might add)
What they have shown in that video could be duplicated in an afternoon. -
#85 by Ben the Space Brit on 16 Feb, 2011 20:15
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I love Arduinos.
So cheap (the board they show cost $30 or less fully integrated) and easy to use! (and already flown in space, I might add)
What they have shown in that video could be duplicated in an afternoon.
Would that stuff need to be hardened to work on the Moon? Remember this is exo-magnetosphere. There are going to be a lot of high-energy betas and photons flying through the rover from the sun; I'd bet those would do disagreeable things to elements like EPROMS and switches. -
#86 by Robotbeat on 16 Feb, 2011 20:18
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I don't know. It's probably one of those things where they're just going to wing it, or they think they can get away with not hardening it. Was the Apollo computer hardened?I love Arduinos.
So cheap (the board they show cost $30 or less fully integrated) and easy to use! (and already flown in space, I might add)
What they have shown in that video could be duplicated in an afternoon.
Would that stuff need to be hardened to work on the Moon? Remember this is exo-magnetosphere. There are going to be a lot of high-energy betas and photons flying through the rover from the sun; I'd bet those would do disagreeable things to elements like EPROMS and switches.
If you have the system hooked up to a watch-dog circuit that will do a hard reboot if it stops responding (and/or fails a check-sum, etc), then you can probably get away with a lot. -
#87 by mr. mark on 03 Mar, 2011 21:12
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New update on lander. New users guide including first 3 moon missions launched with Falcon 9 and target dates.
http://astrobotic.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/AstroboticTechnologyPayloadUserGuide_v2.0.pdf -
#88 by A_M_Swallow on 03 Mar, 2011 22:04
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That lander can deliver 210 kg of payload to the Moon. (No rover) If anyone is planning any ISRU experiments.
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#89 by oldAtlas_Eguy on 24 Apr, 2011 01:48
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For those wondering about the Processors, the BRE440 is a Rad Hard PowerPC processor and at 133MHZ executes 266MIPS.
http://www.broadreachengineering.com/newsroom/news-releases/press-release-january-28-2010/
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#90 by RocketEconomist327 on 24 Apr, 2011 04:43
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Any talk of a MO?
This SCREAMS for it.
VR
TEA
RE327 -
#91 by rjholling on 25 Apr, 2011 00:36
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At least in this video, they are using an Arduino microcontroller package to boot up the Astrobotic rover when the Sun rises:
Oh boy, solid state drives! Those hold up well in hard radiation environments.
I love Arduinos. So cheap (the board they show cost $30 or less fully integrated) and easy to use! (and already flown in space, I might add)
What they have shown in that video could be duplicated in an afternoon.
Only joking. This is really cool.
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#92 by mr. mark on 26 Apr, 2011 16:26
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Lander update. Excellent update including testing milestones.
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#93 by mr. mark on 11 May, 2011 21:01
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Another lander update looks like things are progressing..
"Within two weeks, all the parts of Astrobotic Technology Inc.’s lunar rover and lander should be machined and in the planetary robotics bay at Carnegie Mellon University, and, in two months, the vehicle should be in California undergoing structural integrity testing."
http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/blog/innovation/2011/05/astrobotic-ontrack-for-moon-mission.html -
#94 by mr. mark on 27 Jun, 2011 15:16
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Lander structrual assembly and shipping....Things are moving along.
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#95 by Jim on 27 Jun, 2011 15:31
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Some OSHA rules for working under suspended loads were violated in that video.
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#96 by jimvela on 27 Jun, 2011 16:19
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Some OSHA rules for working under suspended loads were violated in that video.
I was thinking the same thing myself. I'd be in **BIG** trouble for that anywhere I've processed hardware. -
#97 by mr. mark on 27 Jun, 2011 17:02
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Question: Will the Astrobotic lander be flown in the interstage or will it be released from the trunk underneath Dragon? The reason I'm asking is that the lander supports (legs) do not seem to fold up.
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#98 by ugordan on 27 Jun, 2011 17:04
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Uh, it's a dedicated F9 flight.
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#99 by mr. mark on 27 Jun, 2011 17:07
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Ok got you so, It's a fairing based mission. Any ideas on how large the lander is compared to the fairing diameter?
So cheap (the board they show cost $30 or less fully integrated) and easy to use! (and already flown in space, I might add)
Only joking. This is really cool.