Armadillo has posted video over the weekend of their latest adventures in rocketry: a boosted hop to 2000 feet, engine shutdown at apogee, release of a drogue chute, engine relight, and landing. Much like Masten Space Systems' video from less than two weeks prior, words simply can't do it justice -- you must watch the video. Don't forget to remind yourself to start breathing again after the engine relights. Enjoy!
If you missed the launch, I highly recommend watching the replay on YouTube.
SpaceFlightNow also has some great photos of the launch sequence.
And now that I'm watching the replay, I'm pretty glad that the Falcon 9 managed to launch before this giant wasp swooped in to carry the rocket away at T-3 seconds...
A message from Peter Diamandis, on behalf of the X PRIZE Foundation
One topic that was widely discussed at the 2010 ISDC was NASA's new approach that puts more emphasis on commercial space, research and development, science missions, aeronautics, participatory exploration, technology demonstration missions, the Space Station, robotic precursor missions, and other facets of its portfolio. This was contrasted with other possible approaches like the NASA Program of Record and a focus on going directly to Mars.
One part of this discussion is NASA's plan for the Moon. There is a perception that NASA has forgotten the Moon. In contrast, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver stated that NASA isn't abandoning the Moon, and she expects NASA to send astronauts there before the Program of Record could have done that.
A similar message was briefly mentioned at another ISDC talk. I only caught the later parts of the talk, since I was at another one on Spaceport America (I was really surprised how much work has already been done on that!), but I believe it was by Bruce Pittman. Here are my brief notes on that part of the talk:
We haven't stopped the Moon program. We do have plans to go back. First we will go back robotically. We have instruments that haven't been flown - for example, backup instruments from other missions, etc. We could get these ready cheaply. Could we hitch a ride on a Google Lunar X PRIZE team's mission? The idea of such a hitchhiker mission isn't official; it's just something NASA is looking into.
I'm not sure if he meant a prize mission or a later mission. One consideration is that the prize itself includes limits on government funding.
Here are my brief notes from another talk at the 2010 ISDC. In this case, it's not really about prizes; it's about a prize competitor's exciting times after a prize competition. All the usual caveats about my considerably less than perfect note taking apply.
John and Eric gave more details about the recently announced suborbital RLV partnership between Space Adventures and Armadillo Aerospace. John noted that there have been many press releases in the space community, and in many cases, not much happened after that. As a result, he has a rule: don't get up in front of an audience without a check cut. Well, Space Adventures has cut a check for Armadillo Aerospace to develop suborbital spaceships.
John has known Eric since the Tito flight. John doesn't want to go from NASA or Air Force contract to contract. He will continue with contracts, but will focus more on spaceships.
Armadillo is pushing ahead on multiple vehicle configurations. They will probably build more than 2 configurations per year, which is about what they've been doing up to this point. John expects 100 or more flights for science. (I suspect that it was clear at the time, but my notes don't mention what timeframe that's under - before passenger rides start? Per year?) They are looking ahead to test pilot class flights as well.
John is willing to kick in some funding, too. He wants development to go faster. Armadillo is at a special point where they are getting all the ducks lined up in a row - FAA, insurance, spaceports, etc.
Eric mentioned that they are looking into approaches like raffles or sweepstakes where everyone has a shot to get a ticket even if most people can't afford to buy a ticket. They haven't selected a specific approach, so he's not giving details - the ones I mentioned are just to give an idea.
During the Question and Answer session, John noted that Armadillo is staffing up. He expects to be able to keep information updates happening more frequently. This has been difficult to do because they have been so busy.
Our own Amanda Stiles has rightfully chastised me for my prolonged absence here on the Launch Pad--shamefully, my most recent contribution was more than two months ago, and even that was a cross-post to something I had up at the Huffington Post. Artfully done, Ms. Stiles. Here's to better performance on my part in the future!
For my grand return, I thought I'd tackle a subject that's been on my mind lately: how, exactly, do I keep up with all of this MoonBots stuff?
By way of a quick introduction: MoonBots, simply put, is the coolest dang educational program going on these days (no offense to my Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE colleagues and their DASH+ contest, which is worthy of your time and attention, too). Along with our great partners, we challenged teams of students to essentially 'win the Google Lunar X PRIZE' with LEGOs. This happens in two phases: in Phase One, students have to do background research on the 'how' and 'why' of lunar exploration, and must use software to design a lunar robot; twenty finalists will advance to Phase Two, they'll need to actually build both a lunar surface (a "Moonscape") and the lunar robot, all using LEGO components.
When we were designing this competition along with our friends at Google, LEGO, National Instruments, and WIRED's GeekDad blog, this was viewed almost like a pilot program. We knew we had a cool program, but weren't sure what to expect in terms of total registration. In the end, we established a basement target of 50 teams, and a 'stretch' goal of 100.
You can imagine our pleasure, therefore, when registration closed and we had not 50, not 100, but 212 teams (and yes, I've been trying to think of a good boiling-point pun ever since)--it's a credit to the hard work that Chanda and others have put in, but also to the fact that, let's face it, LEGOs and the Google Lunar X PRIZE have a certain inherent appeal.
The only downside--and I'm not sure you could even call it that--to have so many teams is that it's hard to keep up with all of them! To make that a little easier, I thought I'd build on Amanda's "How To" label here, and provide some quick tips on how to be a MoonBots fan.
First, a word on dates:
Registration is closed, as I mentioned above--that happened about two weeks ago. We were very happy that we were able to make registration completely free, and that was probably one of the reasons why we were able to register the 212 teams from 16 nations.
At the end of last week, Phase One closed, meaning that all teams were required to submit several key items. Most importantly, beyond all of the parental consent forms, et cetera, they needed to submit a short, original video describing the importance of lunar exploration as well as their "Robot Design Proposal"--a digital design of the lunar robot they'll build if the team makes it to Phase Two.
Somewhere on the order of three quarters of teams completed those requirements on time. Those videos and those design proposals are conveniently collected at the MoonBots website. Let's take as an example the team Moon Conquerors--one of the first teams to register for the competition. Click on that link in the previous sentence (or, even better, right click or Control-click and open in a new tab) and you'll be taken to the Moon Conquerors team page on the MoonBots site. You'll see the team logo, their location on a map, and the names of the team members right at the top of the page. You'll also see a link to their Robot Design proposal right there. Finally, down below, you'll see a box with a thumbnail of their video entry--if you click that, it will pop up and play without you needing to navigate away from the team page.
It's important to note that many of our MoonBots teams are going well above and beyond the call of duty, and are posting lots of blog posts, multiple videos, and several different images of their robot design. I highly encourage you to check that out--to do so, you'll want to follow the links from the team's page on the MoonBots site to the team's own site (in the case of the Moon Conquerors, it's here), as only the official requirements are posted to their page on the MoonBots site itself.
By clicking around through the various team's pages and sites--use whichever method you like--you can start to get a sense both of the talent of these students and of which teams are your favorites. As you surf around, I highly encourage you to leave notes, questions, and comments for these students--feedback really makes a big difference for all of us, but it makes perhaps even more of a difference for young students fostering an interest in science, technology, and engineering. Viewing each team's page only takes a few minutes--their video essays are running about 3 minutes on average--so you can squeeze in a couple of teams during your lunch break or as the day is winding down. It's a fun way to stretch your brain. At a minimum, try click through whenever Chanda highlights teams here on the Launch Pad.
Our judges are already starting to sort through these teams, with the unenviable task of down-selecting to just twenty Finalists. These Finalists will be announced in about three weeks time. Each finalist will be sent a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 robotics kit and a box full of LEGOs that they'll use to construct a pretty large lunar surface--it's about 2 meters by 2 meters large (7 feet by 7 feet or so).
The twenty teams will be generating a huge amount of content over the summer, as they blog and vlog their construction and testing process. The competition will wrap up in mid-August, when teams will need to roll out both a "Team Documentary" video as well as the actual test of their robot! It promises to be a lot of fun to watch.
I hope you will indeed offer some encouraging words to the students who are working so hard on this process. The time you spend looking in to the teams will pay great rewards for all involved!
Peter Diamandis gave a talk at the 2010 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) as the winner of the National Space Society's Heinlein Award. This is not to be confused with the Heinlein Prize, which he also won, or the literary Heinlein Award. The NSS Heinlein Award
honors those individuals who have made significant, lifetime contributions to the creation of a free spacefaring civilization.
I didn't take thorough notes at this talk or any of the others at this ISDC. I only took a few brief notes on items that stood out the most to me.
Peter noted that he has purchased his Armadillo Aerospace suborbital flight ticket. He hopes to be one of the first passengers.
He described a number of space prizes that the X PRIZE Foundation is considering. Some of these are the larger X PRIZEs; others are X CHALLENGEs. These aren't fully funded or fully developed prizes, so we will have to wait to see if some of these prizes make it through the difficult prize creation process. I should note that I'm a guest blogger here at The Launch Pad, so I don't have any special information beyond the ISDC talk on how prize development is going for these various ideas.
Beamed Power Launch
There are 2 levels for this one - an X CHALLENGE and and X PRIZE. The more difficult X PRIZE objective is to launch 10 kg over 30 km. The prize would be $10M for first place, and $2M for second place. All of the power for the launch would be from beamed energy. The vehicle would need to fly a second time within 24 hours. Only 10% of the dry mass of the vehicle can be replaced between flights.
The corresponding X CHALLENGE is to transmit a large amount of power from a remote source. The teams would provide the microwave or laser power source. I wrote something about 10 kg for this prize, but I'm not sure if this one involves an actual flight. The winner would get $1M, and second place would be $250K.
Asteroid Deflection Prize
The goal of this $20M prize is to pick a 50 meter or larger asteroid whose orbit doesn't come close to Earth's orbit and to deflect it. We don't want to have a chance to bump an asteroid so it will hit the Earth. The asteroid's orbit should be predicted precisely. Then the asteroid should be moved 1 Earth diameter from the prediction over the course of a year. The method must be scalable for asteroids greater than 1 km or larger.
Orbital Debris Removal
The winner of this $20M X PRIZE would remove 5 objects.
Lunar Lander Challenge level 3
This $1M X CHALLENGE would be like the familiar Level 2 prize, but no refueling would be allowed. Staging would be allowed. Like the original prize, it would be for vertical takeoff/vertical landing flights. The total flight time would be 6 minutes.
Suborbital Science X CHALLENGE
This $1M prize would be for a suborbital reusable launch vehicle that goes over 200,000 feet 3 times in 3 days.
Martian Life X CHALLENGE
This X CHALLENGE is also for $1M. It is for development of life that can grow under Mars conditions, including radiation, pressure, and atmosphere. Growth levels of four doublings in 30 days would be required.
Electric Aircraft X CHALLENGE
This would be an annual $1M prize. It would be for the winner of a race from Washington DC to Oshkosh. In addition to winning the year in question, the winner would have to beat previous years' times by at least 15 minutes.
The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was won quite a while ago now, but the former teams keep making news. Here are a few recent updates:
Team Phoenicia - This links to the team's newly designed web site. From that site:
Team Phoenicia is undertaking a herculean venture of gloriously confounding proportions: we are entering the Google Lunar X Prize.
Here are some recent blog posts:
How to Get to Purty (part 5)
How to Get to Purty (part 4)
How to Get to Purty (part 3)
In The News
How to Get to Purty (part 2)
How to Get to Purty
Purty
05/02/2010: More Test Firings - SpeedUp
Briefs: XCOR/Masten Space combo; BonNovA test - RLV News
XCOR and Masten collaborate for NASA landers business - RLV News
Masten Space Re-Lights Rocket Engine in Flight - Masten Space Systems
At least one other view of this flight was shown at ISDC 2010. I think it was this heart-stopping one:
Xombie in-air relight view from the ground. - Masten Space Systems on YouTube
SPACE ADVENTURES ANNOUNCES EXCLUSIVE MARKETING AGREEMENT WITH ARMADILLO AEROSPACE - Armadillo Aerospace
Eric Anderson and John Carmack gave more details about this agreement at one of the ISDC 2010 talks:
ISDC 2010 - Anderson/Carmack, Diamandis, Homans - RLV News
The previous link also includes some comments from the Peter Diamandis talk at the ISDC. In addition to the potential prizes listed there, Diamandis also described a few other ideas (all presumably pending funding and additional development). The one I'll mention here is "Lunar Lander Challenge Level 3". I don't have my notes handy (I haven't unpacked from the conference yet), but as I recall the idea was to have a Lunar Lander Challenge that is similar to the one we know, but with no refueling allowed. Staging would be allowed.
Last week, we mentioned the new partnership between Space Adventures and Armadillo Aerospace for future suborbital spaceflights ("3 Exciting Lunar Lander Announcements to End Your Week Right"). Today, we were excited to see that Space Adventures released a video on YouTube about the partnership:
(Mmm. Rocket video.)
Accessibility | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | About
2008, X PRIZE FOUNDATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED