Nearly
40 years after Americans first set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 with
NASA's historic Apollo 11 flight, a host of private rocketeers are hoping to
follow to win a $30 million prize. Here, SPACE.com looks at Astrobotic, one of
17 teams competing in the Google Lunar X Prize:
If
there's one name that's on the lips of many Google Lunar X Prize competitors,
it's Astrobotic. The team boasts a name that readily conveys its ambitious aspirations
for reaching the moon and beyond.
"Astrobotic
Technology is going to do a series of missions for scouting, prospecting,
mining, and all sorts of things that robots can do to get ready for the human return
to the moon," said David Gump, President of Astrobotic.
Winning
the Google Lunar X Prize requires teams to land
a robot on the moon, move at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and beam high
definition views back to Earth.
The
team plans
for a pinpoint landing just over a mile from the Apollo 11 site, where Neil
Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Astrobotic's "Red
Rover" would then beam back high-definition images of the dusty footprints
left by Armstrong and fellow Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, all while taking
care not to disturb the historical site.
That
rover takes its name from team expert Red Whittaker, a famed Carnegie Mellon
University roboticist who led his team to victory in the 2007 DARPA Grand
Challenge.
Founding
a frontier
Astrobotic
also gained serious financial muscle by partnering with Raytheon Company — a
leading aerospace and defense corporation — to help establish itself as a long-term
player in the race back to the moon and beyond. Carnegie Mellon University and
Arizona State's Lunar and Planetary Institute have similarly signed on.
"Unlike
during the Apollo era, it's clear to many people that the future of the lunar
frontier will be a mixed colony of humans and robots simultaneously," Gump
explained. "Our goal is to be a company to which you can outsource things.
You want to scout a landing site ahead of time, you hire us. You want to get a
soil sample before sending your mining machines, you hire us. You need some
electrical power supply, we'd have a service."
Potential
clients could include nations that would hire one or more Astrobotic rovers to gather
rocks and soil, as part of a prestige sample return mission. The team has already
lined up at least one private client in Celestis, which announced plans to hire
both Astrobotic and fellow competitor Odyssey Moon to fly cremated human
remains to the moon.
Multiple
moon shots
The
series of robotic expeditions to the moon would also collect information to
help build a lunar data library, Astrobotic announced last fall.
A
vision for Astrobotic grew out of long-time collaborations between Gump and
Whittaker, starting back in 1989 when Gump headed the now-defunct Lunacorp and
had plans to place a rover on the moon.
"At
that time we didn't have the credibility of Google dust
sprinkled on us," Gump said, noting a "sea change" in
people's perceptions of the private space industry after aerospace pioneer Burt
Rutan and his Scaled Composites firm's SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari
X Prize for reusable suborbital spacecraft
Now
Raytheon and the other partner institutions have already poured over $3 million
into the new endeavor, and the team looks forward to additional funding from
wealthy sponsors and eventually venture capital investors.
In
contrast to teams that aim to take the X Prize with a budget equivalent to the
first prize purse of $20 million, Astrobotic expects to spend several times
that amount. Gump noted that a smaller budget could place mission constraints
by forcing the team to hitch a ride with another private launch, or reduce the
rover's capabilities to a short-term effort — not exactly in line with the
team's future plans to operate as an independent player in the space industry.
Gump
has said that smaller entrepreneurial teams may yet capture the prize, but the
team would continue with its larger-scale effort.
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