William
"Red" Whittaker and the wizards at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics
Institute in Pittsburgh, hope to use their expertise to snag $20 million in the
Google Lunar X Prize.
Carnegie
Mellon is one of seven teams so far to have sent in a letter of intent and a
$1,000 deposit to compete for the $20 million grand prize, according to Brett
Alexander, the X Prize Foundation's executive director of space prizes and the Wirefly X Prize Cup.
Announced Sept. 13
at Wired magazine's NextFest event in Los Angeles, the Google
Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first team that can soft land
a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, travel a minimum distance of 1,640
feet (500 meters) and transmit high-definition video and other images and data
back to Earth for viewing over the Internet. Second place is worth $5 million
and up to an additional $5 million in bonus prizes can be won by completing
extra tasks beyond the core mission.
David Gump,
president of Reston, Va.-based Transformational Space Corp. (t/Space) and an
advisor to Whittaker's Team X-PLORE, said the team wasted no time registering
for the competition, sending in its letter of intent via overnight delivery the
day it was announced. Gump said the team since has translated the contest
guidelines into 50 "expressed or implied" mission requirements.
"We are
already making great progress coming up with a mission design that will win the
prize," Gump said in a Sept. 24 interview.
Neither
Gump nor Whittaker are strangers to planning lunar missions meant to be done on
the cheap. Gump spent most of the 1990s running LunaCorp, a small firm that
left no stone unturned in searching for the right combination of corporate and
government sponsorships to get a profit-driven lunar lander mission off the
ground.
LunaCorp
eventually signed RadioShack as a sponsor and helped the electronics retailer
pull off a number of space-based promotions before Gump folded the company in
2003 to focus on the space transportation company t/Space.
Carnegie
Mellon's Robotics Institute, meanwhile, not only worked closely with LunaCorp
on mission studies, but also submitted multiple Discovery-class mission
proposals to NASA in the 1990s for robotic lunar landers and rovers designed to
explore the craters and polar regions of the Moon.
NASA passed
on those proposals, in part because the agency was not especially interested at
that time in exploring the Moon. But Carnegie Mellon-built robots have been put
through their paces in a variety of environments here on Earth, including
meteorite-hunting expeditions in Antarctica. Whittaker and the engineers at his
institute also contributed software to NASA's
Mars Exploration Rovers, which have been exploring the red planet since
2003.
Whittaker
said that Carnegie Mellon is ready to meet the Google Lunar X Prize challenge
head on.
"Carnegie
Mellon is a world leader in software and world leader in robotics and we have
experience with and appetite for challenges," Whittaker said in a Sept. 26
interview.
In 2005, a
pair of driverless automobiles designed by Carnegie Mellon completed a 132-mile
(212.4-kilometer) trek through the Nevada desert, taking second and third place
in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Grand
Challenge.
On Nov. 3,
Carnegie Mellon will compete in DARPA's $2 million Urban Challenge, entering a
driverless Chevy Tahoe sport utility vehicle, dubbed Boss, that will attempt to
autonomously navigate a closed 59-mile (96-kilometer) course in Victorville, Calif., complete with stop lights, speed limits and traffic.
Neither
Whittaker nor Gump would say much about Team X-PLORE's technical approach at
this early stage, and Gump said that is unlikely to change even as the approach
matures.
"You have
to remember that this is a race with competitors that shouldn't know about your
strategy," Gump said.
But both
Whittaker and Gump said they believed securing early financing, either in the
form of corporate sponsorship or a benevolent angel, is critical.
"What is
clear from the Ansari X Prize is that you need to have solid funding soon — a
Paul Allen equivalent who can make sure that you are motoring away at a good
speed," Gump said. "One of our team's top priorities is securing that early
funding."
Allen,
co-founder of Microsoft, bankrolled the $20 million development of Scaled
Composites' piloted SpaceShipOne suborbital launch system, which won the
$10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 by completing two back-to-back flights
to the edge of space.
Whittaker
said the real trick of challenges like the Google Lunar X Prize is coming up
with an approach that ensures that all stakeholders win, even if the cash prize
exceeds the team's grasp. Win or lose at the Urban Challenge next month,
Whittaker said, Carnegie Mellon's teammates and sponsors will see a return on
their investments.
"If a team
were backed by $400 million of philanthropic money on Day 1, the technical and
programmatic challenges for X Prize success would be foregone. There would be
no difficulty," Whittaker said. "You can buy victory, but not profitably."
The key to
profitability, according to Whittaker, is making sure that there are a series
of payoff opportunities for sponsors along the way to the actual competition.
Auctioning off naming rights and holding contests to select people who will
actually get to drive the rover once it lands were among the examples he and
Gump mentioned.
Similar
pitches were made to would-be corporate sponsors during Gump and Whittaker's
LunaCorp days. But Gump said there are some big differences between what
LunaCorp tried back then and what Team X-PLORE is facing today, not the least
of which is the involvement of Google, the Internet powerhouse worth more than
$170 billion.
"Two great
things that Google did is they put the Google stamp of credibility on the
overall enterprise and they also set the target to be relatively fixed and
small effort," Gump said.
"The Google
threshold for wining the prize is pretty constrained. You have to land and make
a broadcast, move 500 meters and broadcast again. This means you don't have to
broadcast while moving which is very difficult. It means you don't have to last
on the surface for longer than it takes to move 500 meters and you don't have
to take along tens of kilograms of science instruments."
But the
technical challenges still are formidable. Whittaker and Gump said building a
lander that is capable of making a soft touchdown on the lunar surface is
probably the biggest single expense ahead for any team. Launch is not cheap either,
with prices starting around $6 million for Space Exploration Technologies'
still unproven Falcon 1 launcher and going up from there.
Broadcasting
at least 1 gigabyte of high-definition quality video back from the moon is no
mean feat either.
"That's the
most stressing requirement in the list," said Gump, noting that he knows of no
space-qualified high-definition (HD) video camera. Japanese broadcaster NHK and
Silver Springs, Md.-based Discovery Communications got together in 2006 for the
first live HD broadcast from space. But even in the relatively benign radiation
environment aboard the international space station, "many, many pixels were
being knocked out by radiation damage" within a matter of days, Gump said.
Travel time to the Moon ranges from several days to a month, depending on the
technical approach.
"We
haven't gone to Mike Malin yet to ask him what he might charge us for a
Mars-qualified camera but you certainly cannot walk down to BestBuy and get an
HD camera that can survive the radiation environment," Gump said.
San
Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems has built numerous cameras for NASA
Mars missions and currently is working on a video camera for the 2009 Mars
Science Laboratory spacecraft. That video camera will be capable of 720 lines
of progressively scanned vertical display resolution — a common HD video
standard known as 720p.
Mike
Ravine, advanced projects manager at Malin, said it is not a given that the
camera being designed for the Mars Science Lab (MSL) would work as is on a lunar
mission. "I can imagine a mission where with the overall package it would make
sense to build a copy of the MSL camera, but I can also imagine a number of
mission approaches were it would not make sense," he said.
