

Google is backing private moon landing contest - jkush
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6993373.stm

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ivankirigin
Awesome. But it costs much more than that to do a soft landing on the moon.

The heat differential from night to day is the hardest engineering part. The
launcher from earth is just a matter of money.

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HiggsBoson
> The heat differential from night to day is the hardest engineering part.

Well, aside from getting a significant payload into orbit. ... and getting it
to the moon ... and landing it ... and moving around

... and navigating the regulatory maze so you can: ... store, work with, and
transport hazardous propellants ... actually do engine tests ... actually do
test launches ... transport your test or launch stack across national borders

So, no, not really.

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ivankirigin
I said it was the hardest, not the only hard part. You didn't say why other
things are harder.

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HiggsBoson
Okay, good point. I'm stepping outside my area of expertise, but here's my
intuition:

Radiative cooling and thermal isolation seem to be fairly well understood.
They can also (unlike many, many other parts of the problem) be tested on
Earth. Basically, any satellite needs to deal with this stuff, and designers
_have_ been dealing with it for a long while.

Now, if you add lunar dust to the mix, sure, that's a complicating factor, but
I don't see it being as bad as some of the other things I mentioned.

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ivankirigin
Launch vehicles are a service now. If I were to work on this, I wouldn't work
on a launch vehicle, just the package that could survive the launch & landing.

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ivankirigin
More info here: <http://www.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-10/ff_moon>

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jraines
Why is every google story starting to sound like a segment from one of those
documentaries about a lottery winner who blows it all?

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ivankirigin
$30M prize that probably won't get paid till 2012? This doesn't sound like an
expensive PR stunt.

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mechanical_fish
Particularly when you consider that:

a) Most likely nobody will be able to claim the prize.

b) $30M is like a rounding error to Google.

c) Google will make $30M in ad revenue in the first two hours after they put
up live HD movies from the moon.

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HiggsBoson
> a) Most likely nobody will be able to claim the prize.

I'm pretty sure that Armadillo could do it if they decided to. They've spent
about $3M to date on their development, but they're attacking a very different
problem of (eventually) manned VTVL.

I'm still trying to get my head around how funding for this, and
subcontracting / collaboration would work.

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youngnh
heh, I'd like to see Anybot's Dexter bounding around on the moon. "One small
step for man..."

