Google Sponsors Lunar X PRIZE to Create a Space Race for a New Generation

[mr.columbus]

CommercialSpaceFan - 15/9/2007  8:00 AM
 Question, who are the likely competitors?

The serious contenders will be primarily teams from different universities. I doubt very, very much that any private company that we already know of (Surrey Satellites TEchnology Ltd., SpaceHab, etc.) would commit money to such a mission that has a high risk to not yield any return.

[wannamoonbase]

I agree that established companies probably won't put themselves in the 'prime' position.  But they might help with components like motors for the wheels.

Seems that the consensus is toward university teams.  I wonder if john Hopkins gets into this?  

I'll bet that this weekend the guys that are going to win this are sitting in a lab doing their preliminary design.

[sammie]

On the otherhand, Universities and Space companies are often very well connected. For example Surrey Satellites is owned for 85% by the University of Surrey (spaceX holds 5%). So maybe we'll see some Joint Venture between universities and companies. I also would like to see a comeback of TransOrbital

[A_M_Swallow]

mr.columbus - 15/9/2007  9:40 AM

A_M_Swallow - 15/9/2007  1:04 AM

a) Lunar X prize
Say 444 kg in LEO landing 300 kg on Moon.  This mass includes the lander.

b) Use a larger rocket and scale up the Lunar Lander.
4444 kg in LEO landing 3000 kg on Moon.  Say half to be the final payload.

c) Use an EELV
25mT in LEO landing 17mT on Moon.

Unfortunately, for such LEO mass/payload efficiencies you need a propulsion system with an ISP of more than 2000. So you would need to wait for a high thrust implementation of concepts such as VASIMR...

Opps I rounded the wrong way.  It should have been 280 kg on Moon.

The basis of these estimates was the SMART-1 mini spacecraft that was crashed into the Moon in September 2006.  The launch mass was 367 kg, propellant 82 kg and 287 kg (633 lb) was non-propellant (their rounding errors).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-1

For my calculations I was using an ISP of 1530 seconds, a Delta_V of 5.93 km/s and an initial LEO mass of 443 kg.
Total Delta_V = Delta_V (LEO to EML-2) + Delta_V(EML-2 to lunar surface) = 3.43 + 2.52 km/s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget

The figures were for a Busek BHT-600 Hall Effect thruster.  ISP 1530, 600 W 300A, flow 2.6 mg/sec
Efficiency 49.0% and thrust 39.1 mN
(I notice that large versions go up to 72% efficiency.)
http://www.busek.com/halleffect.html

Using m1 = m0 exp( -Delta_V / (Isp * g)) = 443 * exp( -5.93 / (1530 * 0.00981)) = 289.4 kg

There are other manufactures with rival ion thrusters.

How you actually land with an ion thruster I do not know.

To give you some references on large payloads on their LEO mass/payload to the moon efficiencies - EADS calculated a 1:9 ratio for Ariane 5 ECA (23 tons into LEO; 10 tons into GTO; 2.6 tons of effective cargo on the lunar surface.

They are using a chemical rocket to go from LEO to GTO, a lot quicker but less payload.

A smaller robotic mission put together on a shoestring budget cannot aim of course to the performance of an Ariane 5. I have calculated one scenario above, that yielded a mass/payload ratio of about 1:20. Your 444 kg LEO mass would give you an effective payload mass of approximately 20-25 kg on the lunar surface (still enough for a transmitter on the base and a small rover)

The spacecraft and base use a transmitter.  The thruster and rover use solar panels.  There may be a way of reusing.

[hop]

A_M_Swallow - 15/9/2007  2:31 PM
How you actually land with an ion thruster I do not know.

It's simple... very hard, in small pieces, over a wide area, just like Smart-1. There is no electric propulsion with a T/W anywhere close to being able soft land on the moon. Not by many orders of magnitude. Landing will have to be chemical, almost certainly low ISP storeable propellants.

Some sort of electric propulsion may be attractive for getting from LEO to the moon, provided you can afford it, and provided you can survive many repeated passes through the Van Allen belts. You also have to carry around a hefty power system, which also has to be radiation tolerant, and all your hardware has to have a much in-space endurance.

Overall, I tend to agree with the people who have said this prize is less compelling than the original x-prize. Even if someone can pull it off and come close to breaking even on the prize money, it's hard to see anyone gambling that much on it. Unlike the original x-prize, there isn't a clear follow-up market.

I do think some of the smallsat folks (MOST comes to mind) might have a decent chance of pulling it off with that kind of money, but I don't see them getting the cash up front to try, and it would be very hard to break even.

I do like the way they have structured the prize, and it certainly would be cool if someone pulls it off.

[mr.columbus]

A_M_Swallow - 15/9/2007  5:31 PM

Opps I rounded the wrong way.  It should have been 280 kg on Moon.

The basis of these estimates was the SMART-1 mini spacecraft that was crashed into the Moon in September 2006.  The launch mass was 367 kg, propellant 82 kg and 287 kg (633 lb) was non-propellant (their rounding errors).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-1

For my calculations I was using an ISP of 1530 seconds, a Delta_V of 5.93 km/s and an initial LEO mass of 443 kg.
Total Delta_V = Delta_V (LEO to EML-2) + Delta_V(EML-2 to lunar surface) = 3.43 + 2.52 km/s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget

1. SMART-1 did not use its ion thruster to go from LEO to LLO, rather it was injected to GTO. It used its ion-thruster from there to get to LLO and then for station keeping there. But as mentioned above, a ion-thruster is a non-starter when you want to get to lunar surface + in the price and size area for the mission we are talking about anything other than chemical is out of the question.

2. 5.93 km/s is the theoretical minimum delta-v required from LEO to lunar surface. Add 10% margins, course corrections and the fact that you might want to land somewhere else on the lunar surface than on the equator, landing maneuvers etc. you should assume more like 7 km/s as the total delta-v required. And as mentioned and outlined above, with chemical rockets a 400-500 kg payload will not get anything more than about 20-25kg effective payload on the lunar surface.

[mr.columbus]

hop - 15/9/2007  10:09 PM

A_M_Swallow - 15/9/2007  2:31 PM
How you actually land with an ion thruster I do not know.

I do think some of the smallsat folks (MOST comes to mind) might have a decent chance of pulling it off with that kind of money, but I don't see them getting the cash up front to try, and it would be very hard to break even.

MOST was really cheap to build, it is cheap to operate and also cheap to launch. However it should be noted that it is very likely in another mass category than what a team that wants to win the Lunar XPrize requires - that is 52 kg... I think a good comparable payload would be AGILE or Monitor-E which was on the same Rockot that MOST was launched on, etc.

In any event, I still feel the biggest question is how small the rover and the base station hardware required beside the rover really can be made. Maybe we will be pleasantly surprised by a team presenting a viable proposal for a microrover (under 1 kg) that still can meet XPrize requirements (video camera, roving over 500m etc.).

[wannamoonbase]

mr.columbus - 16/9/2007  3:37 AM

In any event, I still feel the biggest question is how small the rover and the base station hardware required beside the rover really can be made. Maybe we will be pleasantly surprised by a team presenting a viable proposal for a microrover (under 1 kg) that still can meet XPrize requirements (video camera, roving over 500m etc.).

Agreed, this variable determines the rest of the parameters like lander size, propellant needed, launch vehicle size.  Secondary payload will be the way to go but I don't know the upper mass limit on a secondary payload for commercial launchers.

I disagree that there isn't an obvious market follow on from this.  Keep in mind that space tourism was an unknown and caused many to roll their eyes when the first X-Prize was announced.  If someone can deliver a functional rover to the moon for 20 million (or so) and return HD level video and images it will certainly the mind set that a half billion is required to build a rover.

Also, this is Google sponsoring the competition.  Between their web portal and Google Earth I think the exposure of the teams and winners will be unlike anything the space community has ever seen.

[Stephan]

wannamoonbase - 16/9/2007  3:45 PM
Agreed, this variable determines the rest of the parameters like lander size, propellant needed, launch vehicle size.  Secondary payload will be the way to go but I don't know the upper mass limit on a secondary payload for commercial launchers.

Agreed, I wonder what is the price of a secondary payload launch. DeltaV from GTO to the moon shall be around 4 km/s, using storable propellant might be possible so.

[Michael Z Freeman]

Interesting discussion.

I was just reading the excellent speech by John Marburger  ( Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy Executive Office of the President ), which very clearly puts across important information about the context of the Google Lunar X Prize.

I had not realised the enormity of what is happening ...

"FOR EARTH:

Supply clean baseload power to the earth (and enable clean transportation fuel using off-peak power.) Direct implications include:

•    Energy independence from petrochemicals.

•    Large scale reduction of carbon inputs into the biosphere.

• Increased wealth and security with resulting decrease in rate of population expansion as per capita energy use increases in the developing world….without threatening the biosphere." (from the speech)

I'm already scrabbling towards half forgotten rocket engine manufacturer info in my archive. I'm also thinking of how the Orbiter Simulator could be used to test various ideas. It is not recommended to use it to test the actual mission, but it could be used to rule out unrealistic ideas.

I also found  that I did'nt know about. A supporting statement by Arthur C Clarke.

This is just wonderful. If the commercial viability can be proved, then will we see the oil magnates shifting their huge resources and finances into space futures ? From a resource that already has a time limit on it ? Will we see the the same forces that build oil tankers, one day building transportation as big to move resources from the Moon ?

DJ Barney

[A_M_Swallow]

GTO payloads are less than half LEO payloads so a commercial tramp shipper will think very carefully before launching to GTO.  Many bulk cargoes are happy in the Van Allen Belts - water, propellent, plastics for construction and powered down electric motors for instance.

The electronics in the rover will not like the radiation, so GTO is better for this competition.  As for chemical vs ion thrusters that is a mass and time trade off.  Does the GTO to LLO fuel weigh more than the Hall Thruster?

Using satellites to beam solar power to the Earth is almost certainly uneconomic, the Moon is further way making it even worse.

[MKremer]

A_M_Swallow - 16/9/2007  4:20 PM
The electronics in the rover will not like the radiation, so GTO is better for this competition.

That part is pretty much a non-issue, as electronics in any spacecraft, including Shuttle and ISS, are vulnerable to at least high-energy cosmic ray hits. And since it's such an important known issue, it's incumbent on both the electrical and cpu designers/programmers to allow for that and mitigate it with built in recoveries when necessary (or at least a safe-mode implementation with alarms to allow mission controllers to diagnose and recover from it whenever it happens during the mission).

[wannamoonbase]

A_M_Swallow - 16/9/2007  5:20 PM
Using satellites to beam solar power to the Earth is almost certainly uneconomic, the Moon is further way making it even worse.

There is no 'almost' about it.  Space based power, although technically possible is a very long distant dream, at a minimum I would guess 100 years.  Photovoltaics on Earth are more than twice as expensive as grid connected power.  So photovoltaics in orbit or on the moon are going to be on the orders of 100's of times more expensive than anything you could do on earth.  Even if you had a functioning space elevator that could deliver cargo to Geosync for a few dollars a pound the photovoltaics for decades to come will be too expensive.

However, if there was a fully automated lunar factory that could shoot out PV cells and assemble them and you could produce tens of thousands of megawatts of PV cells and the whole system was very non-human intensive.  Perhaps.  But all can probably agree thats a long way off.

Even if all the obvious things could be over come who knows what environmental damage might be done by having a multi gigawatt microwave beam(s) going through our atmosphere would do, other than slowly cook birds.

Now if some point in the future we can produce large amounts of power in space, why not beam it to spacecraft, such as a human craft on the way to mars.  Minimal reactor and solar panels needed.  That would be a weight saver.

[HIP2BSQRE]

Is Google putting up the whole $30 million or are they buying an insurance policy like the X prize?  What other space prizes would people like to see if $30-50 million was the prize?  Do we think that a group will actually inverst the time and money and win the prize?  Does anyone know if Google will setup a site where we can see what groups have been formed so people could contribute if they wanted?

[hop]

I believe there are already some long thread on SPS (space solar power) so perhaps that doesn't need to be in this thread. It's not closely related to the Lunar X-Prize.

John Marburger's speach also doesn't seem to have much connection, as no one has really explained how the Lunar X-Prize furthers those goals.

Back on topic, the guidelines  say

... soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters ...

This seems to imply that it doesn't have to be a rover in the traditional sense. A hopper might be a more viable approach, as very small rovers mobility can suffer.

[Michael Z Freeman]

hop - 16/9/2007  12:02 AM   John Marburger's speach also doesn't seem to have much connection, as no one has really explained how the Lunar X-Prize furthers those goals.

So the Virgin Galactic Spaceport in Nevada has no connection with the previous X Prize ? A whole history of innovation in technology over the last 200 years has no connection with solving problems and meeting challenges ? I quote from the recently signed Global Exploration Strategy that addresses similar concerns ...

"Theme 1: New Knowledge in Science and Technology

At its core, exploration is about taking manageable risks to discover what is unknown. Significantly, much of what it reveals is unknowable in advance. This presents challenges for those wanting to weigh the risks against the returns from new investments.

This problem is as old as innovation itself; when Heinrich Hertz developed the first apparatus to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves in 1887, he hardly envisaged the vast global telecommunications networks of today, or the economic activity they sustain." (page 7-8)

In effect your kind of statement asks us to prove a negative. To predict how the Google Lunar X Prize will meet the goals that Marburger discusses, is demanding the answers to questions that have not yet been answered. A sort of Chicken and the Egg Problem. The whole point of this kind of enterprize is to stimulate the kind of activity that we need, that will score the goals that can solve the problems of our age. Energy, environment, population.

DJ Barney

 

[hop]

DJ Barney - 16/9/2007  4:29 PM
So the Virgin Galactic Spaceport in Nevada has no connection with the previous X Prize ?

This is an apples to oranges comparison.

The previous x-prize was quite different. Anyone building a winning craft had the potential to tap into several pretty plausible markets. It acted to stimulate development of the suborbital tourist market. Recouping some of the investment with the prize was sufficient to get someone to do it (remember, the winning teams backers spent far more than the prize amount.)

It's not at all clear that the lunar prize has a similar effect for any plausible market. If someone spends 50 million winning the lunar x-prize (a similar factor over the prize value to what was reportedly spent on the winning original x-prize entry), I don't see how the state of the art will be advanced, or new markets opened.

If someone spends less than the prize amount and wins the prize, that would be impressive, and probably have a modest impact on low cost planetary exploration, but the relationship to the big picture goals you describe seems pretty marginal.

If you could repeatedly send minimal rover to the moon for a cost of 19 million, it's not at all clear that you could sell many of them.

Perhaps I just lack the vision see it.

The whole point of this kind of enterprize is to stimulate the kind of activity that we need, that will score the goals that can solve the problems of our age. Energy, environment, population.

And landing a toy on the moon relates to this how ?

[A_M_Swallow]

hop - 17/9/2007  2:31 AM
If you could repeatedly send minimal rover to the moon for a cost of 19 million, it's not at all clear that you could sell many of them.

Perhaps I just lack the vision see it.

The whole point of this kind of enterprize is to stimulate the kind of activity that we need, that will score the goals that can solve the problems of our age. Energy, environment, population.

And landing a toy on the moon relates to this how ?

Once the method is known for 10 times the price you can send a rover 10 times, possibly 100 times, larger.  A rover that big can explore for useful minerals on the Moon.  NASA would charge say Lunar Mining Unlimited a lot more than $330 million to send a survey rover to the Moon.  The Lunar Landers in this years X Prize could be used to return the mined minerals.

[Moon King]

I predict this is one X-price that wont be claimed.

Also, i saw the video they created for the X-price announcement. I doubt the whole world will be standing around tv screens in suspense over a rover. Without the human element, it wont be as exiting. Lets face it, without manned flight, NASA wouldnt even have half the budget it now has to send unmanned vehicles to Mars and other places. Lets face it, without half of these vehicles having some PR lines attached to it like ---"exploring to lay the ground for future human missions, or "search for life", there would be no interest in them.

[savuporo]

duh, with realistic propulsion performance, Falcon 1 or other launcher that can throw roughly 500kg to LEO, you can land 30KG of a payload on surface.
Thats more than PLENTY for modern robotics, given that the thing does not have to be packed with science instruments at all.
I also think that using a single set of engines from LEO all the way to lunar surface, with drop tanks makes loads of sense.
There was a lunar IceBreaker design, led by CMU and Red Whittaker sometime in 2001, that had thrusters integrated directly into rover body, to simplify things.
By the way, the same mr. Whittaker, "THE robot guy" has announced his intention to participate already.

As to anyone saying that there is no business or markets on the moon, thats just incredibly short sighted. Any of the organizations involved in the Eighth Continent project ( http://www.isruinfo.com/ ) would jump at the chance of landing their experiments with proven platform at low cost on lunar surface.