lunar lander challenge

A future trip to the moon could use a commercial vehicle, if Armadillo Aerospace has anything to say about it. The company's rocket-powered craft pulled off a mock lunar landing on Saturday to qualify for a $1 million purse from NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

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Wasting no time after the publication of the Augustine Report, both NASA and a competitor for the Lunar X-Prize used this week to test lunar exploration technology. For NASA, this meant a Thursday test of the Ares rocket that forms the bedrock of their Shuttle replacement efforts. For Armadillo Airspace, a test of their X-Prize-contending lunar lander prototype.

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On day two of the 2007 X Prize Cup, between dealing with Armadillo Aerospaces faltering attempts to win the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and serving as master of ceremonies for the days events, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis took a few minutes to talk to PopSci about the future of his organizations marquee event. Read the interview after the jump.—Seth Fletcher

Image Courtesy Zero-Gravity Corp

 

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That tiny speck in the distance is Armadillo Aerospace's MOD 1 aircraft, right before not quite winning the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico on Saturday. To win Level One, the lander has to rise up to 150 feet in the air, hover for 90 seconds and land on a pad 100 meters away. Then it has to do the same thing in reverse. MOD 1 nailed the first part, but failed in the final stretch of its reverse trip. A nozzle failure knocked the lander off balance with only seven seconds to go, causing it to miss the landing pad. As a result, the $350,000 prize is still unclaimed. —Seth Fletcher

Update: Sunday morning's attempt failed, too, again on the reverse trip. Sounds like the problem this time was a crack in the MOD 1's engine—MOD 1's new engine, which the Armadillo team installed after yesterday's failed try. Word is they'll try it Level One again this afternoon.

Another update: No dice for Armadillo this year. Their afternoon attempt failed; there was talk earlier today of a possible third attempt this evening, but according to an X Prize spokesperson, Armadillo founder John Carmack decided against it. That means it'll be this time next year, at the earliest, before anyone wins the prize.

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The Wirefly X Prize Cup was a three-ring circus of space-related entertainment for the thousands of spectators who filed in to experience rocket launches and flight simulations, meet astronauts and tech dignitaries, and watch teams of engineers vie for $2 million in NASA-sponsored prize money. But although the action was brisk, all three of the NASA prizesthe $200,000 Climber Challenge, the $200,000 Tether Challenge and the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challengewent unwon over the course of the weekend.

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Peter Diamandis is at it again. I'm sitting in a room at the 2006 International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, where Diamandis is announcing his latest prize to spur entrepreneurial space innovation. (Diamandis, as you'll probably recall, is the impresario behind the $10-million Ansari X Prize, which spurred a race to develop a privately-funded suborbital spaceship that culminated in the successful November 2004 flights of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne<.) This time, in conjunction with NASA's Centennial Challenges program, he's got his eye on the moon—specifically, landing on it. His Lunar Lander Challenge will award cash prizes in two categories, to be demonstrated and judged at this year's X Prize Cup in New Mexico. Build a lander that can successfully rise to a height of 50 meters, stay aloft for 90 seconds while traveling 100 meters, land without incident on a flat landing pad, then repeat the feat, and you'll score $350,000. Upping the ante a bit, if your lander can stay aloft for twice as long and land on a surface that simulates the moon's surface, you're looking at a $1.25-million payday. You'd better get working, though, because time is tight: The X Prize Cup runs from October 18 to 21.  —Mark Jannot

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For Peter Diamandis, boring old space just isnt good enough anymore. After his foundations X Prize competition resulted in the first non-government manned space mission in world history, Diamandis apparently needs more.

Last week, the X Prize Foundation released the draft rules governing its new $2 million Lunar Lander Challenge. The competition has been designed to simulate the demands of a lunar voyage, including a landing and return flight. The rules for the most demanding of the two contest divisions call for a rocket-powered craft to take off, maintain a steady altitude for 180 seconds, then land at a second point simulating the lunar surface no less than 100 meters away. Teams will then have 30 minutes to refuel their craft before launching it again from the landing point, flying it for another 180 seconds before landing it at the initial launch area.

Since Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt pulled in the ladder on Apollo 17 in 1972, only a handful of spacecraft have touched down on the moons surface—none of them carrying human passengers. And while the competition rules do not call for living cargo, a privately-funded trip to the moon is slowly beginning to sound less like the ravings of 1950s pulp science fiction and more like an attainable reality. (Since PopSci last covered Space Adventures CEO Eric Andersons lunar tourism dreams, his company has announced plans to build private spaceports in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates).

The competition is scheduled to go down before the end of the year. So those readers with any spare liquid-burning rocket motors or Lunar Lander mock-ups laying around in the garage, nows the time to dust them off and get to work. Check out the rules here. —John Mahoney

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