Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

This sounds like great fun, and lots of discussion stuff.

Originally Posted by TheBigDog

If needed we will break into sub teams such as launch, landing, rover, broadcast, navigation, etc.

An important “etcetera” is, I think, finance and accounting. US$20,000,000 – 25,000,000 isn’t a lot of money by any aerospace standards, and the “runner up” prize of $5,000,000 even less, so you’ve gotta have a solid base of high-risk investment, advertisers or otherwise. I expect the practical details of this can be as or more complicated than the project’s rocket science.

Until the official rules are actually published, replacing the current competition guidlines, it’s an accurate high-level picture of the challenge, involves some guesswork. I’m guessing, however, that the primary requirement - “To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough…” – means only that the team must solve only the Earth-Moon trip, landing, and surface operations problems. I see nothing in the guidelines, and suspect there will be nothing in the final rules, prohibiting the use of a proven commercial launch system to reach Earth orbit. Commercial cost to LEO are from $5,000 - $40,000 /kg, so getting 1000 kg of vehicle – 1/45th of an Apollo CSM and LEM, as a comparison - into orbit on budget appears feasible.

That out of the way, we can get creative. Getting the most payload from an economic Earth orbit to a soft landing on the Moon with the least initial mass involves a lot of very different engineering approaches…

All the other problems strike me as solvable through good COTS shopping and integration. For example, low-cost Doppler radar units can determine ground speed to within .05 m/s, sufficient to soft-land a lunar lander, while spread-spectrum radio should allow control and communication with a fraction of the signal strength required in the 1960s and 70s.

How well COTS hardware tolerates vacuum and low temperature, and how to warm and harden it as necessary, seems one of the major, critical challenges of such an approach. A good vacuum chamber for testing will be essential.