I doubt Google co-founder Sergey Brin is much of a fan of Savage Garden, but he also wants to fly to the moon(Savage Garden reference here if you’re puzzled…),. Or, at least, he wants somebody to build him a robot rover, fly it to the moon, and beam back pictures - and his company has put up a $30 million prize pool to make it happen by 2012.
To get the prize, the winning craft must land on the moon (something that hasn’t been done since the Soviet Luna 24 in 1976), deploy a rover that travels at least 500 metres, and beam back an extensive collection of pictures and video. That gets you $20 million. There’s an additional $5 million in bonuses available for various extra tasks, like travelling 5,000 metres, taking pictures of human artifacts already present on the Moon (stuff left behind by Apollo), or discovering water ice. There’s also a second prize of $5 million for the second organization to achieve the mission goal.
Amongst the space nerds, there’s been a fair bit of debate about the chances of anybody winning the prize, mainly because launching the thing into space will chew up a large part of $20 million - and possibly well over it, if one of the bigger satellite launch rockets is required. But, as this guy notes, there’s some tricks to doing this up on the cheap - most crucially, if you’re prepared to take the long, slow way, you can get into orbit around the moon using a tiny fraction of the fuel used back in the 1960’s. Thus you can get away with a much smaller, cheaper rocket to launch the thing off earth.
Already, Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics lab have announced that they intend to have a go. Here’s hoping that several teams make a serious attempt.
This is just typical Google spin. First, if it’s such a great idea, why doesn’t Google put the money up and do it?
Answer: because it actually costs a lot more than $30 million.
Second, why then would they offer this prize? Because it’s fabulous free PR that a doting public sucks up. Google will never have to pay up, so there’s no cost. Meanwhile it helps Google get even more fawning treatment from governments around the world, including our dopes. Google recently gained a nice tax benefit in Australia when our government extended the 175 percent tax rebate to cover R&D not owned by Australian interests.
That would be my first reaction as well. Who is going to put up (say) $50 million to win $30 million? Surely it would be extremely difficult to do what Brin is asking for less than £30 million.
The track record with these is mixed. The original X Prize was won by Scaled Composites. The DARPA Grand Challenge - to build a robot vehicle to navigate a 150-kilometre off-road course - was also won. But others haven’t worked because the task was too ambitious, for instance, a $50 million prize for a reusable orbital spacecraft is going to go unclaimed.
But I strongly disagree with your assessment that it’s impossible. Remember that if you’re part of the winning team, you get a whole bunch of valuable publicity on top of the 20 million dollars. For instance, maybe you could get Microsoft to sponsor your team for the purposes of tweaking Google’s nose.
The key things that make it doable ar a) you don’t have to build your own rocket - you can either buy a launch (if you design a small enough rover, you could build the whole thing to fit on a Falcon 1 at $8 million a pop, or a Dnepr at $10 million), or go up as a secondary payload on a commercial satellite launch, b) you can use a super-efficient trajectory to get you from Earth orbit to lunar orbit with bugger-all fuel (at the cost of taking several months to do so), c) the rover doesn’t actually have to do all that much, and d) the moon is only a couple of seconds away by radio, so you can drive much faster than you can on Mars.
Yes, Google is in this for the publicity, and yes, I just gave them some. But I still reckon this is a) cool, and b) stands a reasonable chance of succeeding.
$30 million spent on advertising by putting commercials on TV, radio and in in traditional print media which ends up giving the same media we constantly whinge about. Or $30 million spent on something that might actually be useful, or at least pretty cool. I know which I prefer.
swio, the issue is that Google isn’t spending anything, yet it’s getting enormous PR as if Google is actually doing the project.
If you look at poor old Carnegie Melon’s project page, linked in Robert’s final paragraph, you see they’re begging for money so they can embark on the project. They’re even inviting prospective sponsors to consider mining the moon as a reward.
And responding to Robert’s suggestion about Microsoft sponsoring a team, Google wouldn’t be annoyed at all. That’s a rival wasting $50 million on a Google PR project. Google would be laughing, as they are now.
The project is not impossible, but it’s unlikely to be feasible, and would almost certainly be more expensive than the prize offered by Google. The supposed cheap rocket launch has never launched a moon vehicle, so there would almost certainly be complications after deploying the package in earth orbit.
Intelligent operation is hard at the best of times, but this project requires systems that work in extremes of temperatures, affecting not just the circuitry, but also the image processing task.
As an illustration of the difficulty of unforeseen problems, many vehicles in the DARPA desert navigation challenge had performed well in testing. But in the actual desert, numerous assumptions were exposed as invalid. For example, obstacle avoidance algorithms can’t just presume that the vehicle is always able to reverse cleanly.
It is interesting to consider though, so good on Robert for posting about this.