LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- A little bit of Apollo Moon history was revisited here today. The Northrop
Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was staged for the first time at the Wirefly X
Prize Cup.
The NASA-sponsored Challenge is part of the two-day Cup being held October 20-21 at the Las Cruces International Airport. NASA is providing $2 million in prize money for the Challenge.
The event was founded by the creators the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million prize package offered to anyone who could launch a re-usable sub-orbital spacecraft, capable of carrying passengers, twice in a two week period.
Roaring
off into clear skies over a stretch of remote terrain, the Armadillo Aerospace
vertical takeoff and landing vehicle rose to altitude, remained aloft, scooted
horizontally a distance, but ran into trouble at touch down on a landing pad.
The
craft--nicknamed "Pixel"--came down too fast causing breakage of landing legs. Fire damage caused
by the hard landing has curtailed the vehicle's second flight - needed to claim
NASA prize money. Depending on overnight fixes to software and hardware,
another attempt at grabbing Lunar Lander Challenge money may be attempted.
Permit to experiment
John Carmack, lead
rocketeer of the Mesquite, Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, admitted in a pre-flight interview of being nervous about the team's space shot
today. Test flying of their rocket hardware on Thursday was highly successful,
but some technical snags cropped up during those early shakeout hops.
For
one, Carmack said their vehicle kicked up significant dust making it tough to
remotely control the touch down. "I couldn't see a damn thing," he noted, as he
piloted the automated craft with a hand-controller.
For
Pixel to take to the air today, it had to pass regulatory safety oversight of
the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space
Transportation. That body granted Armadillo Aerospace an experimental permit to
fly, Patricia Smith, Associate Administrator for the office told SPACE.com.
Despite
the landing problems, Carmack remained optimistic about the flight.
"I
think that the best benefit that NASA can possibly get out of this is an
operation like this - going from concept to almost successful flight in under
six months by a team of 8 people part time for about $200,000," Carmack said
after the flight. "That should change some of their current contractors that
are going to be spending tens of billions of dollars doing different things."
On the level
Winning
the Level 1 competition was worth $350,000 in prize money - a purse provided by
NASA's Centennial Challenges. This NASA effort is meant to promote technical
innovation through a novel program of prize contests.
Rocket
teams for the Lunar Lander Challenge are scored on their ability to meet
challenge requirements, the accuracy of their landing and, in case of a tie,
the number of "round trips" they can complete within a specified period of
time.
New
ideas, like those stimulated by the Lunar Lander Challenge can help return
humans to the Moon by 2020, said Art Stephenson, vice president of space
exploration systems for Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector.
Armadillo
Aerospace had competitors for this year's Lunar Lander Challenge. However,
other teams experienced technical as well as financial woes, narrowing down the
field to Carmack and his team this year.
Theory and reality
While
the pursuit of the Challenge did significantly accelerate the development of
Masten Space Systems' commercial XA-1 vehicle, the group had to delay taking
part in the contest.
Vertical
Takeoff and Vertical Landing spacecraft are hard, Masten said. "We knew that
when we started this business. In the end, it was Murphy that conspired to delay
enough key elements that we couldn't meet the X Prize Cup deadline," he said.
"Over
the last couple of months we have been working on issues where theory and
reality did not quite meet up. We have all those issues just about wrapped up,"
Masten told SPACE.com.
The
group's XA-1 is being readied for flight in the very near future, said Michael
Mealling, Vice President of Business Development.
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