Lunar lander liftoffs
Posted: Friday, October 10, 2008 5:35 PM by Alan Boyle
First it was on, then it was in limbo, and now it's on again: The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a $2 million NASA-backed competition for rocket-powered lander prototypes, is now due to take place Oct. 24 and 25 at Las Cruces International Airport in New Mexico.
The contest had been scheduled elsewhere in the state, at Holloman Air Force Base, reprising last year's setting. That venue was ruled out, however, reportedly due to some military operations that took precedence. After weeks of scrambling, the Lunar Lander Challenge's organizers at the X Prize Foundation worked out new arrangements this week with the Las Cruces airport as well as the Federal Aviation Administration.
It helped that the first challenge was conducted two years ago at the airport, said Marc Schulman, the X Prize Foundation's vice president of partnerships and marketing. The landing pads used back then were still in good shape, he told me.
The challenge offers a range of prizes for teams who can direct their landers by remote control from one pad to another pad 50 meters (yards) away, and then back to the start. The top prize of $1 million would go for a trip that includes a hang time of three minutes and involves landing on an uneven, lunar-style surface.
In the past, Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace was the only competitor. This year, there's likely to be some healthy competition. In the past, the challenge has been open for public viewing. This year, only invitees (such as journalists and participants in the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight) will be allowed to attend.
Meanwhile, another multimillion-dollar rocket competition - the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for honest-to-goodness lunar landers - has two new competitors: Independence-X Aerospace, based in Malaysia; and Omega Envoy, led by students at the University of Central Florida. That brings the current field for the Google Lunar X Prize to 14 teams.
The X Prize Foundation unveiled the new teams on Tuesday along with a new "preferred partner," Analytical Graphics Inc., which will be providing all the teams with AGI spaceflight simulation software. Schulman explained that the software will help the teams make sure that they're on the right track when it comes to planning their trajectories to the moon.
