FYI,

"Carnegie Mellon Sets Sights on Google's Lunar X Prize"
Space.com
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20071001/sc_space/carnegiemellonsetssigh
tsongoogleslunarxprize;_ylt=AvGQgnxT0ZuPsN6Hc0byPUkE1vAI

: William "Red" Whittaker and the wizards at Carnegie Mellon
: University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, hope to use their
: expertise to snag $20 million in the Google Lunar X Prize.

: Carnegie Mellon is one of seven teams so far to have sent in a
: letter of intent and a $1,000 deposit to compete for the
: $20 million grand prize, according to Brett Alexander, the X Prize
: Foundation's executive director of space prizes and the Wirefly
: X Prize Cup.

: Announced Sept. 13 at Wired magazine's NextFest event in Los
: Angeles, the Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the
: first team that can soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the
: Moon, travel a minimum distance of 1,640 feet (500 meters) and
: transmit high-definition video and other images and data back to
: Earth for viewing over the Internet. Second place is worth
: $5 million and up to an additional $5 million in bonus prizes can
: be won by completing extra tasks beyond the core mission.

: David Gump, president of Reston, Va.-based Transformational Space
: Corp. (t/Space) and an advisor to Whittaker's Team X-PLORE, said
: the team wasted no time registering for the competition, sending in
: its letter of intent via overnight delivery the day it was
: announced. Gump said the team since has translated the contest
: guidelines into 50 "expressed or implied" mission requirements.

: "We are already making great progress coming up with a mission
: design that will win the prize," Gump said in a Sept. 24 interview.

: Neither Gump nor Whittaker are strangers to planning lunar missions
: meant to be done on the cheap. Gump spent most of the 1990s running
: LunaCorp, a small firm that left no stone unturned in searching for
: the right combination of corporate and government sponsorships to
: get a profit-driven lunar lander mission off the ground.

: LunaCorp eventually signed RadioShack as a sponsor and helped the
: electronics retailer pull off a number of space-based promotions
: before Gump folded the company in 2003 to focus on the space
: transportation company t/Space.

: Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, meanwhile, not only worked
: closely with LunaCorp on mission studies, but also submitted
: multiple Discovery-class mission proposals to NASA in the 1990s for
: robotic lunar landers and rovers designed to explore the craters
: and polar regions of the Moon.

: NASA passed on those proposals, in part because the agency was not
: especially interested at that time in exploring the Moon. But
: Carnegie Mellon-built robots have been put through their paces in a
: variety of environments here on Earth, including meteorite-hunting
: expeditions in Antarctica. Whittaker and the engineers at his
: institute also contributed software to NASA's Mars Exploration
: Rovers, which have been exploring the red planet since 2003.

: Whittaker said that Carnegie Mellon is ready to meet the Google
: Lunar X Prize challenge head on.

: "Carnegie Mellon is a world leader in software and world leader in
: robotics and we have experience with and appetite for challenges,"
: Whittaker said in a Sept. 26 interview.

: In 2005, a pair of driverless automobiles designed by Carnegie
: Mellon completed a 132-mile (212.4-kilometer) trek through the
: Nevada desert, taking second and third place in the U.S. Defense
: Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Grand Challenge.

: On Nov. 3, Carnegie Mellon will compete in DARPA's $2 million Urban
: Challenge, entering a driverless Chevy Tahoe sport utility vehicle,
: dubbed Boss, that will attempt to autonomously navigate a closed
: 59-mile (96-kilometer) course in Victorville, Calif., complete with
: stop lights, speed limits and traffic.

: Neither Whittaker nor Gump would say much about Team X-PLORE's
: technical approach at this early stage, and Gump said that is
: unlikely to change even as the approach matures.

: "You have to remember that this is a race with competitors that
: shouldn't know about your strategy," Gump said.

: But both Whittaker and Gump said they believed securing early
: financing, either in the form of corporate sponsorship or a
: benevolent angel, is critical.

: "What is clear from the Ansari X Prize is that you need to have
: solid funding soon — a Paul Allen equivalent who can make sure that
: you are motoring away at a good speed," Gump said. "One of our
: team's top priorities is securing that early funding."

: Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, bankrolled the $20 million
: development of Scaled Composites' piloted SpaceShipOne suborbital
: launch system, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 by
: completing two back-to-back flights to the edge of space.

: Whittaker said the real trick of challenges like the Google Lunar
: X Prize is coming up with an approach that ensures that all
: stakeholders win, even if the cash prize exceeds the team's grasp.
: Win or lose at the Urban Challenge next month, Whittaker said,
: Carnegie Mellon's teammates and sponsors will see a return on their
: investments.

: "If a team were backed by $400 million of philanthropic money on
: Day 1, the technical and programmatic challenges for X Prize
: success would be foregone. There would be no difficulty," Whittaker
: said. "You can buy victory, but not profitably."

: The key to profitability, according to Whittaker, is making sure
: that there are a series of payoff opportunities for sponsors along
: the way to the actual competition. Auctioning off naming rights and
: holding contests to select people who will actually get to drive
: the rover once it lands were among the examples he and Gump
: mentioned.

: Similar pitches were made to would-be corporate sponsors during
: Gump and Whittaker's LunaCorp days. But Gump said there are some
: big differences between what LunaCorp tried back then and what Team
: X-PLORE is facing today, not the least of which is the involvement
: of Google, the Internet powerhouse worth more than $170 billion.

: "Two great things that Google did is they put the Google stamp of
: credibility on the overall enterprise and they also set the target
: to be relatively fixed and small effort," Gump said.

: "The Google threshold for wining the prize is pretty constrained.
: You have to land and make a broadcast, move 500 meters and
: broadcast again. This means you don't have to broadcast while
: moving which is very difficult. It means you don't have to last on
: the surface for longer than it takes to move 500 meters and you
: don't have to take along tens of kilograms of science instruments."

: But the technical challenges still are formidable. Whittaker and
: Gump said building a lander that is capable of making a soft
: touchdown on the lunar surface is probably the biggest single
: expense ahead for any team. Launch is not cheap either, with prices
: starting around $6 million for Space Exploration Technologies'
: still unproven Falcon 1 launcher and going up from there.

: Broadcasting at least 1 gigabyte of high-definition quality video
: back from the moon is no mean feat either.

: "That's the most stressing requirement in the list," said Gump,
: noting that he knows of no space-qualified high-definition (HD)
: video camera. Japanese broadcaster NHK and Silver Springs,
: Md.-based Discovery Communications got together in 2006 for the
: first live HD broadcast from space. But even in the relatively
: benign radiation environment aboard the international space
: station, "many, many pixels were being knocked out by radiation
: damage" within a matter of days, Gump said. Travel time to the Moon
: ranges from several days to a month, depending on the technical
: approach.

: "We haven't gone to Mike Malin yet to ask him what he might charge
: us for a Mars-qualified camera but you certainly cannot walk down
: to BestBuy and get an HD camera that can survive the radiation
: environment," Gump said.

: San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems has built numerous
: cameras for NASA Mars missions and currently is working on a video
: camera for the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft. That video
: camera will be capable of 720 lines of progressively scanned
: vertical display resolution — a common HD video standard known as
: 720p.

: Mike Ravine, advanced projects manager at Malin, said it is not a
: given that the camera being designed for the Mars Science Lab (MSL)
: would work as is on a lunar mission. "I can imagine a mission where
: with the overall package it would make sense to build a copy of the
: MSL camera, but I can also imagine a number of mission approaches
: were it would not make sense," he said.

Mark Reiff