FYI,

"How to Win the Google Lunar X Prize and Beat NASA to the Moon"
Popular Mechanics
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4265261.html

: The year is 2012. A quarter-million miles from Earth, a small
spacecraft is nearing the surface of the moon. When the unmanned
craft touches down in a cloud of rocket-blown dust, it becomes the
first man-made object to arrive intact on the lunar surface in 32
years.

But the logo on the side of the spacecraft doesn't belong to NASA or
any other government space agency. Instead, the images beamed back to
Earth by the small rover that emerges from the spacecraft reveal a
familiar multicolored corporate logo: Google's. Not a single dollar
of public money has been expended, or a scrap of governmental red
tape encountered, during the mission.

That's the scenario envisioned by the creators of the Google Lunar X
Prize, a $20 million reward for the first privately funded group to
land a rover on the moon by Dec. 31, 2012. To win the prize, the
rover must do more than arrive in one piece. It must ­travel at least
500 meters, or about a third of a mile, and send a "mooncast" of high-
definition video, photos and text to Earth.

The point of the contest is to encourage entrepreneurs and inventors
to participate. So, in the spirit of PM's long heritage of do-it-
yourself projects, we offer aspiring X Prizers this guide to landing
your own rover on the moon­. Don't let the tight deadline deter you
from trying: If nobody wins by 2012, $15 million will remain on the
table for late arrivals through at least 2014.

The X Prize Foundation models its efforts after contests that spurred
technological progress and public enthusiasm during the golden age of
aviation. Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight from New York to Paris was
undertaken in pursuit of the $25,000 Orteig Prize, donated by a hotel
magnate in 1919. In 1996, the X Prize Foundation offered $10 million
to anyone who could build a reusable spacecraft. The contest inspired
aerospace maverick Burt Rutan and Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to
create SpaceShipOne, which flew private astronauts to suborbital
altitudes twice within two weeks in 2004.

This latest, lunar addition to the X Prize franchise is meant to
focus participants' time and money on affordable innovations. At this
writing, 10 teams have registered to compete for the jackpot. "It
used to take a nation to land on the moon," says Peter Diamandis, CEO
of the X Prize Foundation. "We're throwing down the gauntlet to
challenge pri-vate groups to do it a hundred times cheaper."

The Checkbook

Even with the most frugal project managers, winning will likely cost
your team more than the prize is worth. Preliminary budget estimates
made by X Prize teams range from $20 to $100 million. With
billionaire benefactors like Allen in short supply, you'll have to
devise creative ways to make up the difference—corporate
sponsorships, perhaps, or even fees to haul precious, though creepy,
cargo. "One kilogram of cremated remains soft-landed near the Apollo
11 site could be worth $5 million," says Red Whittaker, head of the
Astrobotic team, a serious contender with backing from Raytheon and
Carnegie Mellon University. Odyssey Moon, which developed a for-
profit lunar-rover-based business plan before the X Prize was
announced, says it already has $40 million in payload fee
commitments.

Other proposed money-raising schemes include selling TV rights,
licensing toy rovers and charging earthbound drivers for the chance
to steer the rover by remote control. One team plans to enable its
rover to trade instant messages with thousands of earthlings.

Although you'll have to develop your own rover, almost everything
else you need—rocket motors, telemetry packages, attitude thrusters,
launch vehicles—can be plucked out of the parts bins of space
companies in the U.S. and abroad. "This isn't just a race to the
moon, it's a race to Russia to see what kind of stuff they've got for
sale," says Odyssey Moon CEO Bob Richards, whose space sensor company
developed the first commercial laser radar scanner flown into space.

Having a staff of veterans on your team is a big advantage: One of
the three partners in Astrobotic is Raytheon Missile Systems, which
will bring in technicians with experience from prior NASA lunar
programs.

The Broadcast Package

Your rover's cameras, transmitters and power supply are the design
linchpins for the entire mission. The mass and volume of this core
payload dictate the design of your rover, which in turn influences
the lander and, ultimately, the choice of launch vehicle.

Keeping in mind that the going rate for putting commercial payloads
into orbit is $5000 per pound, you should aim for a maximum target of
11 pounds for the package.

There's no need to reinvent the camera. A couple of RocketCams from
Ecliptic Enterprises should weigh a total of about 3 pounds and cost
in the low six figures, including a controller and cables. For a
first-class upgrade—after all, $20 million is riding on the camera's
performance—con­sider a $5 million video unit from Malin Space Science
Systems, derived from those in development for NASA's planned Mars
Science Laboratory.

Broadcasting your 1 GB data set to Earth will be a bigger
challenge. "Nothing off the shelf can do this," says Rex Ridenoure, a
former NASA deep-space mission engineer and co-founder of the space
firm Ecliptic Enterprises.

In designing a broadcast transmitter, you'll have to balance power
requirements, aiming capabilities, beam widths and data transmission
rates in order to broadcast a signal. The broadcast needs 30 to 40
watts of power, presumably supplied by solar cells on your lander or
rover.

The faint signal of your lunar broadcast will need to be downloaded
when it reaches Earth. You should first con­sider a recent offer made
to the X Prize Foundation by the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence Institute to use its recently opened Allen Telescope
Array (ATA), which scans the universe for radio signals from
intelligent extra­terrestrials. Last October the first 42 of a planned
350 dishes became operational.

But ATA only receives signals. To send commands to the rover, you can
use Universal Space Network's worldwide array of radio transmitter
receivers. The company will rent the dishes and process all
communications during the trip for a couple of hundred thousand
bucks.

The Rover

Your design goal is deceptively simple: Build the smallest, lightest
rover that will carry your broadcast package across the required 1640
ft. of lunar terrain. You'll also have to decide whether to use a
rover that separates from the lander or combine the two vehicles into
one unit.

Astrobotic's Whittaker, a long-time Car­negie Mellon rover guru who
recently won the Pentagon's $2 million DARPA Urban Challenge,
envisions a 130-pound, four-wheel rover about waist high. One side
will be draped with solar panels. As the rover zigzags across the
moon, the panels will continually face the sun. Astrobotic's
ambitious plan calls for a landing near the Apollo 11 site in
July '09, the 40th anni­versary of Neil Armstrong's arrival, and
perhaps a 15-mile journey to Surveyor 5, a 1967 NASA lander.

Taking the minimalist approach to an extreme, one team claims its
rover might be the size of a cellphone. Another, headed by geo­
stationary-satellite pioneer Harold Rosen, plans to use a "hopper"
that would fire its hydrazine rockets for a few seconds in the weak
lunar gravity and, in a series of jumps, travel the prescribed
distance. An Italian team suggests using several small robots on
mechanical legs. "Anything goes," Diamandis says. "We want to inspire
totally new thinking."

The Lander

Your spacecraft will likely be traveling at about 5000 mph during its
approach to the moon, and, without an atmos­phere, a parachute is
useless for braking and producing a gentle touchdown. "This isn't a
competition about rovers," says Bob Richards of Odyssey Moon. "It's
really a competition about landers. The winner is the team that gets
this part right."

All landers will require retrorockets to slow down during the
descent. Fortunately, ATK Thiokol Propulsion offers a variety of
tested solid-fuel motors for this task. "There's almost no margin for
error with the landing," Ridenoure says. "It'll be a nail-biter."

You may prefer to have an autonomous lander because the 3-second
delay in radio transmissions from the moon makes remote controls
sluggish. If you're going for the $1 million bonus prize for a
closeup look at a man-made artifact on the surface, you'll need a
pinpoint guidance system. Good luck trying to match Astrobotic, which
plans to guide its craft with software developed by Raytheon to steer
Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Finding lunar landing experience in the private sector is tricky. For
example, a previous earthbound X Prize, the $2 million Lunar Lander
Challenge, still awaits a winner after two years. The goal of that
contest is to build something that can take off vertically from the
New Mexico desert, hover at 150 ft. and then land at a designated
spot 328 ft. away. Only one team, computer gaming guru John Carmack's
Armadillo Aerospace, has managed even to fdevelop a contest-ready
lander—but it has yet to beat the challenge.

SpaceDev, which helped develop the hybrid rocket motor for
SpaceShipOne, recently flew a prototype lunar lander during a brief
cable-guided test for a private international astronomical group that
wants to establish a lunar telescope. Company officials say the
lander can carry an X Prize rover and that at least one team has
shown interest.

The Launch Vehicle

Prepare to enter a murky, secretive world where commercial launch
providers' brochure claims may be suspect and prices are "very
negotiable," according to space consultant Charles Bradley. Depending
on your budget and the mass of your rover/lander package, you have a
number of commercial launch options from large aerospace
corporations, small startups and international players.

If you are diplomatically savvy and also lucky, there are several
budget-friendly options, like thumbing a ride on an already planned
geostationary-satellite launch. Once in orbit around the Earth,
you'll separate from the satellite and do your own final burn to the
moon's orbit. Better yet, we hear that the Russian firm Lavochkin has
440 pounds of spare payload space available all the way to lunar
orbit on the announced Luna-Glob mission, set for 2012.

These options should be considered long shots: Experimental
hitchhikers are not usually welcomed on presold commercial launches.
That leaves more expensive alternatives. Elon Musk, the PayPal mogul
and founder of SpaceX, has spent more than $100 million to develop
the world's lowest-cost space launcher. Musk, who sits on the X Prize
board, has promised competing lunar teams a 10 percent discount off
the bargain $8.5 million list price for a ride on the still-in-
development Falcon 1.

Although SpaceX has been designated the contest's "preferred launch
provider," their base-model Falcon 1 has yet to reach low Earth
orbit, much less blast off a moonshot. Two test firings have both
fallen short; a long-delayed third attempt to reach Earth orbit is
set for this summer. Some team leaders have expressed skepticism that
the Falcon 1 will be able to handle the weight of their rovers,
landers and rocket­braking stages. Going bigger means a costlier
investment: SpaceX's much larger Falcon 9 is scheduled to fly in
2009, but at a prediscount price of $47 million. The only proven
commercially available moon rocket is Lockheed Martin's Athena II,
which in 1998 boosted NASA's Lunar Prospector into orbit around the
moon. The company claims the rocket can send about 800 pounds to the
moon. The last Athena II launch was nine years ago, and Lockheed
Martin is mum about building more. Estimated price: $25 million.

Demilitarized nuclear missiles are another good option. Orbital
Sciences' Minotaur V is a proposed modification of the surplus
Peacekeeper ICBM. The missile, not yet cleared for commercial use,
could loft nearly 1000 pounds of payload out of Earth's orbit at an
estimated price of $30 million. In a similar swords-to-plowshares
conversion, the Kosmotras Dnepr is based on a former Russian ICBM and
can now launch 1600 pounds toward the moon, for the bargain price of
$15 to $20 million.

Realistically, the odds seem to be against a prize-winning lunar
mission by 2012. But take heart: Lindbergh and Rutan beat long odds.
If you manage to snag a friendly billionaire and follow our how-to
guide, there's no reason you won't be ready to join the pantheon of
aerospace prizewinners.

Mark Reiff