A California-based
team of engineers has snagged a $1 million NASA prize by winning a pitched
competition to fly homemade rockets on mock moon landing missions.
Masten
Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., successfully flew its rocket Xoie (pronounced
Zoey) twice within a set time limit to qualify for the top Level 2 prize in
the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a NASA-sponsored contest to build
mock lunar landers.
The Masten
team beat longtime front-runner Armadillo
Aerospace, a Texas-based team led by video game developer John Carmack,
with precision flying on Oct. 30 that gave their Xoie vehicle the best landing
accuracy of the multi-month competition. An award ceremony is set for Thursday
in Washington, D.C.
"This was
really the horse race that we were always hoping it would be," Will Pomerantz, senior
director of space prizes for the X Prize Foundation, told SPACE.com. "To come
down and be so close, and have so many teams going back to back to back here at
the end of the window, I think, has exceeded our expectations in a way that
we're thrilled about."
The X Prize
Foundation, which awarded the $10 million Ansari X Prize for privately-built
suborbital manned spacecraft in 2004, has managed the lunar lander competition
for NASA since it began in 2006. Northrop Grumman, the company that built
NASA's original moon landers for the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, supported the event.
Horse
race, with rockets
The Lunar
Lander Challenge is one of NASA's Centennial Challenges that offer cash prizes
for engineering feats. For the Lunar Lander Challenge, NASA offered a total of
$2 million in awards for successful flights of vehicles capable of hopping from
one launch pad to another.
There were
two levels to the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and two prizes per
level to add up to the $2 million total. Level 1 required teams to fly their
vehicles up to 164 feet (50 meters), remain aloft at least 90 seconds and make
a round trip between two different launch pads.
Carmack's
Armadillo Aerospace won the $350,000 first-place prize for Level 1 in 2008,
with the Masten team nabbing the $150,000 second-place purse earlier this month
with
a different rocket called Xombie.
Level 2 of
the contest was trickier, but with a much larger payout. It also required a
round trip flight, but extended the flight to 180 seconds (3 minutes) and
included a simulated moonscape for added difficulty.
Carmack,
founder of the id Software company, and his team qualified for the $1 million
prize in September using
their Scorpius vehicle, which had an average landing accuracy of about 35
inches (87 cm).
But it was Masten
Space Systems, led by engineer David Masten, which won last week after pushing
through a communications glitch, a pad fire and a truck stuck in the sand to
take home top billing. During an extra day of competition, Masten's Xoie rocket
flew twice with a landing accuracy of about 7 1/2 inches (19 cm).
"I
can't say enough good about the Masten team," Masten said in a statement. "They
take my crazy ideas and make them work."
With first
place for Level 2 in Masten's hands, Armadillo Aerospace will take home the
second place prize of $500,000.
Rockets
built by two other California-based teams - Unreasonable Rocket led by a
father-son team of Paul Breed, Sr. and Paul Breed, Jr., of Solano Beach and
BonNova of Tarzana – failed to qualify for the challenge.
With all $2
million of NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge prize money awarded, the competition
is effectively over, unless the space agency opts to sponsor another round of
competition.
Pomerantz
said the X Prize Foundation is looking for another potential contest, one that
bridges the gap between the Lunar Lander Challenge and its own Google Lunar X
Prize, which is offering up to $30 million
in prizes for the first teams to build and land real moon landers or rovers
on the lunar surface.
Judges'
decision questioned
The
competition was not without some controversy. A decision by contest judges to
enforce rules that allowed Masten Space Systems an extra third day to try for
the Level 2 prize - after the team exhausted its two-day window last week - did
cause some consternation among the other teams.
The rules
allow judges to give a team more time to compete if it forfeits a flight
attempt before launch time. The decision gave Masten an extra try (ultimately
successful) at Level 2 after two days plagued by glitches and a fire. It also
allowed Unreasonable Rocket another day to try for the Level 1 award on Sunday.
In a
statement to MSNBC last week, Carmack said he understood the decision and felt
no ill-will toward Masten Space Systems, but did feel it dealt a critical blow
to his team's chances at $1 million.
"The
rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything up to and
including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it necessary, so
there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do feel that we have been
robbed," Carmack told MSNBC in an e-mail.
Pomerantz
said that judges deliberated "literally for hours" before deciding to allow
Masten a third day of Level 2 competition on Oct. 30. The decision, he added,
was then discussed among all Lunar Lander Challenge competitors.
"They did
grumble about it a little bit, but they did understand the logic of it,"
Pomerantz said.
advertisement
