I 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
Seconded. I worked with Astrobotic (https://www.astrobotic.com) while at CMU, and many of us have the GLXP to thank for becoming better engineers and leaders.
What 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.
Considering that there's little time left, your payload (and business model) has severe constraints. Unless you have something pre-developed and nearly ready to launch (e.g. at a university), aim for something simple. That leaves you mostly with media attention (sponsors), technology demos (e.g. for third parties), paraphernalia/vanity items that wealthy individuals or communities pay for (no remains or religious artifacts please). But please be inventive.
$980k (€800k) [1] for the first kg to the lunar surface, for lunar orbit it's less (ask me in private, it's not published). Expect $50k-500k to develop the payload (depends on what it is and who builds it). There are several open source CubeSat designs and kits that give you an idea.
So whether you have a simple payload/business model or a more sophisticated one (more suitable for a later launch probably), contact me better sooner rather than later. Many details need to be cleared early on.
I think this is probably one of the most viable business models for a "CubeSat" sized payload. If I had a rocket to the moon, that is the first thing I would offer: "mix your human dust with moon dust"
Figures above suggest somewhere in the million dollar mark for a kilo of payload. There are ashes into diamond services, and ballpark figures would be 5 one carat diamonds to a gram or 2500 for half a kilo.
A million dollars split between 2500 is just $400 each.
Obviously very rough figures but it nothing screams outrageous to me. I'd be surprised if you couldn't fill 2500 of those orders.
Only problem I see is that 0.5 carat cremation diamond is $6000 US, and it would be a "waste" of the ashes since they only use a few ounces (~150g) and a human cremated is roughly 5kg.
BUT, if a person is fine with only sending a portion of their loved one to the moon for the super "low price" of $20k, it would only take 75 to break even, but there is room for a WHOLE lot more.
Space burials [1] are a thing. When I investigated this, I found that in Germany the cremation industry is against separating remains, i.e. don't bury a part on Earth and another on the Moon. I'm not aware whether a legal background exists, but at least some might consider it as morally dirty (though I doubt people would really complain over here, but in other cultures people might react stronger). So it depends on your country (culture, jurisdiction) whether it's a viable business case.
A constellation of cube sats orbiting the moon would provide a nice synthetic arepture radio antenna that would be shielded from earth noise. It's a lot more economical than a giant dish on the moon itself.
Not in the industry, but I'd guess in the short term there are two options:
- scientific orgs (NASA, universities, etc); I get they'd love to pay for access to lunar surface. Maybe even some imaging from the dark side of the Moon?
- prospecting companies like Deep Space Industries or Planetary Resources.
I know what people mean when they say "dark side of the moon" but it always bothers me. There is no "dark side" to the moon. The picture that got stuck in my head was seeing the moon transit the earth: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/08/21/4296866.ht...
The moon is tidally locked: rotates at the same speed that it resolves around the Earth. Therefore the same side always faces the Earth, modulo liberation.
Is there some site where i could find the mass estimates for all system components, as well as injection trajectory/delta-V budgets?
All GLXP entrants i heard of seem to have planned to make do with exceptionally low LEO insertion mass. Which sometimes made me think of them as vaporware.
"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."
Wasn't all transportation extremely accident-prone in 1927?
When Lindbergh made his flight, commercial air travel was already 13 years old (not counting Zeppelins) and already growing rapidly. US Airline passengers nearly tripled from 1928 to 1929, from 60,000 to 170,000. That wasn't just because of Lindbergh, it was mostly because of the Ford Tri-motor.
All those passenger flights funded commercial airplane manufacturers to invest in new designs, and by the early 1930s we had far safer and more cost effective metal monoplane designs like the Boeing 247 and DC-2, and then the DC-3s. It was one of the great revolutions in transportation history. So what was so bad about it?
> The entire debate about a particular prize being nothing more than a stunt is a debate that doesn't fit well on HN
The article compares the Ansari X Prize [1], which Scaled Composites won, to the Orteig Prize [2], which Charles Lindbergh won. It's a statement on the efficiency of prizes, generally, in fostering technological change. Not a complaint abut a specific prize.
The evidence the author collects, across multiple articles and many decades show prize money is better spent on other things. The "inspire others" and "get NASA a larger budget" or "more VC funding" bits don't happen, or don't happen as effectively as if those goals had been directly pursued, e.g. paying for PR, lobbying or actually making the VC investments.
The optimizations made to win the prize rarely translate into broader success. The resulting disappointment(s) and inevitable hype-cycle end can end up doing more damage in the long run.
The Longitude Prize and DARPA's self-driving car competitions were successful. Here's what differentiates them: the people who wanted to buy the product set the rules of the prize to yield something useful to them. The products of the X Prizes either have terrible product-market fit ("market" to be read broadly to include non-commercial users) or pursue the wrong goal (e.g. manned spaceflight crowding out launch-cost reduction, et cetera).
I think the debate forces an acknowledgement that the objectives themselves don't always have intrinsic value.
I agree there's a lot of things that can be gotten from it like NASA funding, but many people do not really "know" the utility of going to the moon.
For example, people will talk about mining on the moon, but I've only ever seen articles debunking the utility of this, and not a single in-depth analysis in favor of this. I might be looking in the wrong spots.
My theory is that relatively few people can justify the value of these efforts convincingly. This is part of why NASA doesn't have a bigger budget. "Whitey on the moon"[0] has a ring of truth to it.
Developing strong arguments for further development is one of the most effective ways for people to support further development.
Otherwise you end up with things like "We'll go to Mars for space tourism/exploration!". Which is... well you do what you want with your money, but that's a hell of a lot of money for tourism. Public funding will be hard to come by.
Launching a rocket capable of getting even a penny into space is dangerous. Reasonable precautions can mitigate those risks, but these things are not toys.
Look 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.
The legacy of Scaled Composite's air launch approach, aerodynamic re-entry, and piloted design--all fair decisions for a quick daredevil run to space--cost Virgin Galactic and its investors hundreds of millions of dollars. Their delays, overruns and mistake, in turn, made life difficult for SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra, and a handful of other space start-ups. Customers, Congress and investors now had a well-publicized promise, and failure to deliver, in mind.
Look, if we're talking manned space flight, I was arguing against it 3 years ago in favor of robotic exploration. HN said I was wrong.
As for X-Prizes, in general, I think they're a great idea. My blog is http://h4labs.org
I took h4 from the first "X-Prize". H4 was the version of the watch that won the money. It has been explained repeatedly why they're a great idea. Should I rehash it on my blog, because I'm not going to do it here, again?
Btw, it sounds like we might simply be arguing over what's a good "X-Prize"?
Even just building and testing rocks has killed people because they are fucking dangerous. However, so is putting solar panels on people roofs. That does not mean nobody should build rockets, just that safty is a major consideration when building them.
IMO, astronauts are almost irrelevant from an overall safty standpoint. Rocketry has killed more people on the ground than it has people trying to get to space, though this may change over time as we get away from those extremely dangerous early days.
Ex: Just VLS-1 an unmanned rocket killed 21 peopel more than the total number of US astronauts killed so far.
What difficulties did Scaled Composite cause for SpaceX or Blue Origin? SpaceX is doing great, and the flying turtle has consistently achieved laudable milestone after laudable milestone.
That's somewhat selective quoting given that, beside safety, the linked article effectively contrasts the two prizes. The industries in question are themselves different - beside tourism for those with money to burn (a fairly limited market), there's not much of an application for suborbital flight. The wide commercial applications of aviation were obvious by the time Lindberg flew.
It 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.
> "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.
Since 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?
I 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.
Features will almost always be modelled in a tool like Matlab/Simulink, which has a C generator specifically aimed at automotive software. Similar tools that are used by EEngs, MechEngs etc. have the same functionality.
The support software underneath (equivalent to the OS kernel, OS libraries, frameworks etc. you would use to run desktop apps) is typically configured in one or more AUTOSAR[1] tools. The exchange format for AUTOSAR is .arxml, which is a horrible adaption of XML. These tools will also take .armxl files as input and generate the source files that contain the standard components, the drivers, the glue code for inter-component communication etc.
Only the software components that are not covered by the AUTOSAR standard or handed down by the car manufacturer as standard components will typically be written by hand, though even for those we will increasingly often write generators in e.g. Python. That's because different versions of the same car, different target plattforms (that is car models) etc. will often use different subsets of features, different internal networking, different messages etc. and since everything has to be set statically before compile time, we need to generate different versions.
TBH I doubt that much of that is open-source. There is a reference implementation of AUTOSAR and there are some code generators that are FOSS as part of the genIVI project. But practically all tools you would actually want to use are closed source and super expensive. That's one of the major reasons why the push for open-sourcing automotive software is not going to lead to anything.
[1] AUTOSAR is an international standard for automotive software architectures and components/APIs/etc. that is aimed at making software modules more or less plug'n'play between different SW vendors, car manufacturers etc. All of this is statically "linked" at generation time! The software will not even compile if things don't match exactly. The first version of a Linux-based Adaptive AUTOSAR that basically works like Android has been released recently, though.
That's pretty accurate. I won't say which company I work for but I work on control systems and write software for safety critical systems. It's usually C or Ada, like someone else mentioned and there's always two instances (if not more) running in parallel, talking to each other to make the right decision all in real time. A lot of the technology is 'outdated' compared to other industries, but that's because of the difficulties in qualifying new tools and systems.
I'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.
It 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?
I 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.
I 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.
The 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)
Seriously, 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.
I 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."
Well 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.
Instead 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Sad.. 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.
I 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.
If 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?
Not 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.
how 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.
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