Part Time Scientists: "Hell Yeah it's Rocket Science"

Photo courtesy of EuroMold

This week we are happy to bring you a team video profile featuring interviews with Robert Böhme and Sebastian Rattay of the team Part Time Scientists. This team has been quite industrious in the past few months, in both the physical and virtual worlds. Among other activities, the team unveiled the prototype of their lunar lander last week and they recently broke 10,000 fans on facebook! 

The team has been hinting at a big announcement on Friday, so definitely stay tuned for that by following the team on their GLXP website, Twitter, or Facebook. And in the meantime, enjoy the video!

Any updates on when the final rule set will be publicly released?

Ah, this is a good one to end on! Always a topic of interest.

The "release candidate" of the final rules set (or, more properly, the Master Team Agreement, which contains not only the technical rules but also the legal language necessary to make it a binding contract) has been submitted to our friends at Google for their final approval. I expect that will arrive shortly (although I've learned not to guess exact timelines whenever lawyers are involved). Once we have it, it will go out to teams, who will have a few weeks to sign it and get it back to us.

Finalizing these rules has been a loooooong process, but that's been by design. With so many iterations, and so many chances for teams and others to help us add clarity, close loopholes, and eliminate unnecessary requirements, the document has really benefit. It's been crowdsourcing in a very good way.

The final agreement will be made available for public download. So, don't believe the version you used to be able to find on the now infamous (for other reasons) WikiLeaks site--that was a interim draft for discussion purposes. I'm big on transparency, so we'll make the actual document available.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Once you saw the field was going to be so much bigger, was it discussed to increase the purse to reward more than 5 or 10% of the applicants? I realize it's quite large already but still only rewards the first place team for each goal correct?

It wasn't really discussed--I think the $30 million cumulative prize purses is already about as small as it can be to still be an effective carrot at the end of the stick to motivate all of those teams. We do expect that in this prize, like almost every other incentive prize in history, most teams will be willing to spend more than the prize value in their efforts to win the prize, but there is a limit to how high they'll go--and historical data suggests probably somewhere between ~2 and ~4 times the amount they could claim.

That said, we did do something relatively new with this competition by offering both the Grand Prize and the Second Place prize and a variety of bonuses. We've also tried to massage the Bonus Prize program to make that as effective an incentive as possible. By offering those bonuses "a la carte", if you will, I think we've turned that money into a much better carrot--maybe the equivalent of a $12 or $15 million carrot, instead of just $5 million.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

What can you tell us about the NASA ILDD program?

NASA's ILDD (Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data program) is a -GREAT- program NASA started in August 2010. Essentially, NASA realized that with the Google Lunar X PRIZE and other efforts, there are now a number of private companies who can sell NASA extremely valuable data about the Moon and about lunar costs at extremely inexpensive rates. These are data that NASA has never been able to purchase before, and which would cost NASA a great deal to acquire for itself. So, they put out this program which allows private companies to be paid for providing this data on a milestone basis. Six Google Lunar X PRIZE teams were selected from about a dozen applicants; these teams are already providing cool and unique data to NASA scientists and engineers.

It's a very low cost, very low risk, very high reward program for NASA. I absolutely applaud NASA for taking such a leadership role here--I know for a fact that other space agencies are monitoring ILDD and trying to figure out how they can play catch up and offer similar programs.

As you can tell, I'm pretty much a fanboy for this program. The only thing I don't like is the acronym!

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

How many different countries are represented by the GLXP? Are any of the teams involving students in their process?

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is massively international, more so that any of our other competitions to date--and a HECK of a lot more so that the first era of lunar exploration.

Our current teams are headquartered in eleven nations, but many of them are themselves international, meaning that we have team members in something like 70 countries and on every continent save Antarctica (still working on that one). I think FREDNET--our most massively multinational team--alone has members in something like 60 nations.

As for students: they are also involved in a major way. I think we have something like 30 universities that are parts of registered teams. We have several younger students involved as well, including some of the students who competed in our "MoonBots" educational competition. And, of course, countless students and educators around the world have used our online lesson plans and video or have found other ways to incorporate the Google Lunar X PRIZE into related course work. To all of you students who had to answer Google Lunar X PRIZE questions on their engineering exams or similar: I hope you enjoyed them! And, depending on what grade you got, I'm sorry / you're welcome!

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

What % of funding must be private, what % can be government?

As of right now, no more than 10% of the cost of a Google Lunar X PRIZE mission may be supplied by government funding. For clarity, though, I should note that teams may conduct an unlimited amount of commercially reasonable sales to the government--those don't count against that cap.

I should also note that the final Google Lunar X PRIZE rules set will be issued to teams in the very near future, and to the public shortly thereafter. Percentages other than 10% have been proposed, though they also follow the same logic that drove that rule (addressed in a previous question-answer couplet). Soon we'll see what the final percentages are.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Exactly how many teams are involved in the Google Lunar X PRIZE?

As of right now (the morning of December 2, 2010), we have:

- 21 teams that are registered for and actively pursuing the Google Lunar X PRIZE

- 6 teams that were formerly registered but either are no longer competing or have merged into other registered teams

- 6 active "Letter of Intent to Compete" signatories

- Countless other potential teams who have expressed an interest in registering prior to the December 31, 2010 deadline.

For reference, the median estimate of competing teams put forth by our advisory committee (some of the most amazing people out there) was about six. My personal estimate was between ten and fifteen--and I'm an optimist. I'm very happy to have been wrong.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

How many registered teams do you expect to see once registration has closed?

Ha! Good timing on that question--came in just as I submitted my answer to the previous question (about how many teams are currently enrolled).

I think we'll both gain a few teams and lose a few teams over the next month. I'm guessing we'll end up at around... 22?

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Does the winning team's technical information remain private to those involved to keep trade secrets or does it go public to further the industry since the winners get the payout from the foundation?

All competing teams, not just the winner, get to keep their intellectual property. We very much want them to set up long lasting, profitable businesses, and we know that patents and trade secrets are a big part of that. We also don't want them or us to go to jail for ITAR violations.

Of course, the winning missions will be covered on live TV, there will be documentaries, and each team is actually required to blog and post video to YouTube. But this will be done at an appropriate level to educate and inform the public without giving away trade secrets.

As an interesting aside, several X PRIZE winners (if I recall correctly, Burt Rutan and John Carmack are both in this camp, but I could be wrong) are fairly anti-patent. But that's their personal preference, not an X PRIZE imposed position.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Will you have a launch tweetup?

Great idea! Yes, absolutely, we should make this happen. The launch site and date are in the hands of the teams, so I can't 100% guarantee that this will be possible... but if it is possible, I think it's an absolutely fantastic idea.

Also, this reminds me, we need to have another X PRIZE Foundation TweetUp soon. We'll have to get on that...

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

When do you foresee the first private lunar landing?

Assuming you mean robotic lunar landings, I'd say... early 2013. Note--that's just a guess, and doesn't reflect any confidential information from our teams.

If you mean landing of a human crew... 2025. I think I'll still be of acceptable astronaut age then, so if anyone is looking for a crew member, you know where to find me...

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

How do the Google Lunar X PRIZE organizers feel about adding a bonus for 9-10 micron heterodyne (exoplanet ozone) lunar VLBI science pack?

Well, I for one feel like I should do some addition research on what exactly 9-10 micro heterodyne lunar VLBI science packs are! = )

On a more serious level...

I might be fine with it if someone had the funds to cover the prize purse. But my initial gut feeling is that this payload is probably best served by being a paying customer working directly with a competing team or teams.

Our bonus prizes are really aimed at enabling technologies, with the hope that once those are developed and proven, a rational and open marketplace will be available to accommodate future needs like this one, as well as those we have not yet even begun to contemplate.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Do you think the GLXP will cause excessive advertising on the moon?

No, I don't. As mentioned in my previous answer, Google Lunar X PRIZE teams will almost certainly be reliant on private funding--which is to say venture capital, corporate sponsorships, and donations. Each of those revenue sources have a huge interest in making sure that the public is supportive of the winning missions, rather than turned off by them (donors because, well, they are the public; corporate sponsors because angering the public would defeat the purpose; and venture capitalists because they are in it for the post-prize profit, and post-prize profit won't be realized if everyone turns against the team).

I think the public outcry against gaudy advertising would be universal and fairly strong, so I'm very confident we won't see it. What we will see are the logos of the individuals, non-profits, and companies that made winning missions possible put onto the winning robots themselves, which strikes me as an appropriate recognition of the contributions of those people and entities. But it will be at a pretty small scale and, by my definition at least, well shy of "excessive".

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Why is the requirement for GLXP at least 90% privately funded, not 100%?

I'll zoom out a bit and first answer the question of why have any private funding requirement at all? We do this not because we don't like government space exploration--we do--but because we want to find a way to make sure that X PRIZE-winning technologies and capabilities are economically sustainable. As great as Apollo and the Soviet programs of the same days were, their tragic flaw was that they couldn't be sustained and that they didn't lead to long-lasting lunar exploration. Government space agency expenditures are often driven by non-repeatable motivations (a particular coalition of power, a need to demonstrate national prestige, et cetera). We can't exactly write in a rule saying "be financially sustainable," so we try to achieve that goal by proxy by saying "raise most of your money from the private market."

With that goal in mind, we could probably make the case for private financing requirements anywhere between 51% and 100%. Traditionally, we've gone with 90% because we think it fulfills our goals, but leaves some flexibility so that we are not ruling out worthy competitors. We don't want a really good team to be turned away because, for example, they won a small SBIR grant a few years ago--and we don't want the controversy of people fighting over what does and does not count.

90% rules have some precedent in things like amateur photography contests, global sporting events, et cetera. We've borrowed from that. Notably, other numbers have been in active discussion for the Google Lunar X PRIZE and other competitions, but the underlying intention and rationale are always the same.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

On international teams, how do US team members cooperate with the ret of their team without violating ITAR? Do they have to male their subsystem with little communication to other team members?

ITAR is certainly a hugely important issue--and a hugely complex one--for international teams with some US component. Yes, often times these teams have to totally cordon off some subsystems and restrict them to either all-US or none-US (to coin a phrase) subgroups.

this is another area where Google Lunar X PRIZE teams have a chance to innovate. A group like, for example, FREDNET is bound by the same laws as a traditional aerospace contractor (at least in this case), but is probably prone to develop some different solutions. I'm looking forward to learning from them, in this among so many other ways.

As a side note, on a personal level, I'd like to add my voice to the chorus of those arguing for ITAR reform. I'm a strong believer in national security, but I don't think that ITAR as currently enacted maximizes national security -- and I know it has a steep economic and technological price.

Ask me about the X PRIZE Foundation's space activities, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Catching up with Team Synergy Moon

2010 was a great year for catching up with a majority of the Google Lunar X PRIZE teams, as we had not just one, but two Team Summits (one in February at NASA JPL in Pasadena, California, and one in October at the Isle of Man). At both of these Summits, we conducted interviews with team representatives to find out what they are currently working on and what their plans for the future are. Every team has a unique story and approach to winning the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and our goal is to share this with you through a series of videos about the teams -- made up entirely of the interviews that we conducted throughout 2010. Enjoy! 
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This week's team video is Team Synergy Moon, featuring team members Kevin Myrick, Miroslav Ambruš-Kiš, and Olav Zipser.

"Moon 2.0 is a brand new thing. It is the Moon for everyone; for the engineer, for private enterprise, for individuals who really want to get involved (finally) in going into space and doing space research, exploration, and development." - Kevin Myrick, Team Synergy Moon

This international team (12 countries!) has really been ramping up their efforts over the past year by partnering with educational institutions, technical organizations, marketing teams around the world. You can find Synergy Moon on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, GLXP and their own website. And now for your viewing pleasure, the Team Synergy Moon video:



Just yesterday, Team Synergy Moon made a big announcement that current team leader Kevin Myrick is stepping down and handing the reins over to the capable hands of Miroslav Ambruš-Kiš ("Mak") -- although Kevin assures us that he will still be very involved with the team. We wish Synergy Moon the best as they continue in pursuit of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and in their space outreach efforts!