Google Lunar X Prize Options

[Phil Stooke]

Am I completely out of it, or is there no GLXP thread on here? I couldn't find one. Anyway, things are moving on it, so I thought we ought to have one.

For the record, I just turned down my second invitation to join a team. I'm staying as an interested observer on this - for now, anyway.

There is a forum at the GLXP site as well as team info. There are a lot of people with half-baked ideas of how to go about it. The real professionals are not doing much on the forum, just working behind the scenes.

At LPSC two weeks ago, Bob Richards of Odyssey Moon invited people to propose instruments to carry on their rover - targeted to a pyroclastic deposit, probably Rima Bode or Sulpicius Gallus. And I see they have now signed an agreement to carry Celestis's lunar burials to the Moon. Richards will be here next week, and I'll be spending some time with him.

This whole thing is going to be interesting.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

And here.....

http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/leonarddavid/

... (Oct. 30 blog) is a story about Odyssey Moon making all the right connections for its lander development work.


There are only a few teams who can be said to have a chance at this competition, and these two are the frontrunners by any reasonable criteria. There are other serious teams, but they have a lot to do to catch up. And then there are the teams who are too far behind to have a chance. They will either drop out, probably fairly soon, or join other teams to combine their expertise. That's my take, anyway, and I'm following this very closely.

Mike - you're right to be skeptical, as we have seen other companies like Applied Space Resources (anyone remember them? I had dinner with them once in Houston) and Transorbital start a lunar project and then fail for lack of money. The thing that's different now is the new opportunities to cooperate with NASA, such as Discovery Missions of Opportunity funding, and more interest in purchasing services along the lines of COTS. I believe there's a chance that this can work, though I suspect the six missions Astrobotic are outlining may be rather too optimistic.

Phil

[mcaplinger]

The thing that's different now is the new opportunities to cooperate with NASA, such as Discovery Missions of Opportunity funding, and more interest in purchasing services along the lines of COTS.

The Discovery MOO seems like a stretch, as the program is really designed to fly on missions that would exist for some other reason: funding a mission by flying a MOO on it is sort of the tail wagging the dog. And NASA's interest in COTS is rather notoriously fickle. This, and the fact that the X PRIZE Foundation retains media rights for all of the data obtained in order to win the prize, makes things pretty tough (admittedly you can have separate data/instrumentation, but that just makes things that much harder.)

That said, Phil, I have to admire your optimism for assigning any credibility to GLXP at all.