Google Lunar X Prize Update: Funding Remains an Issue
MTV-1X vehicle in full tether mode. (Credit: Moon Express)
The IEEE Spectrum has an interesting update on the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, which recently slipped its deadline for landing a rover on the moon from the end of 2015 to Dec. 31, 2016.
The story confirms what I’ve suspected for quite some time now: it’s much easier to build and test hardware on Earth than it is to get it to the lunar surface. With two years, not one of the 18 remaining teams has locked down a firm launch date. If none of them does by the end of 2015, the competition will end without a winner.
Raising the necessary funds is a significant challenge. Some were counting on SpaceX’s (relatively) low-cost Falcon 9 launch vehicle. However, the rocket has a full manifest of missions, and the company’s launch schedule keeps slipping. The article also reports that secondary payload opportunities on launch vehicles have proven to be difficult to arrange.
I could be wrong, but I’ve thought for some time this has been a two-horse race between Astrobotic and Moon Express. Both teams appear to have the technical capability to land a vehicle on the moon, and they have progressed significantly in developing and testing the hardware.
The advantage Moon Express has is it was co-founded by Naveen Jain, a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded InfoSpace. This might give Moon Express a leg up in finding money for a launch.
Here we have shades of the Ansari X Prize, where billionaire Paul Allen’s funding allowed Burt Rutan to build and test SpaceShipOne. The venture won the prize, and Allen was able to recoup his $25 million investment. No other team even came close.
If no one can confirm a launch reservation by the end of 2015, the prize will come to an end after 8 years — the same amount of time it took NASA to land men on the moon — without anyone claiming it.
Astrobotic has promised to continue on with its moon mission even if it can’t fly in time to claim the Google Lunar X Prize. However, that might be a more difficult task without the $20 million first prize money there for the taking.
It would be great if someone actually claims the prize. However, what happens next has always been unclear. Proponents believe it will help spur a commercial market for sending instruments and experiments to the moon. But, what if it’s just optimistic talk? What if there is no market? What if commercialization attempts fail?
The Ansari X Prize promised a new era of commercial spaceflight. Ten years later, we’re still waiting for that to arrive. The demand seems to be there, but companies have thus far failed to deliver.
It’s not like this a commercial lunar mission hasn’t been tried before. X Prize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis’s BlastOff! Corporation failed at that goal in 2000-2001 before folding.
Inspired by this failure, the Google Lunar X Prize was predicated on the idea that conditions had changed sufficiently. But, it could be that getting to the moon is still cost prohibitive.
44 responses to “Google Lunar X Prize Update: Funding Remains an Issue”
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Good analysis Doug. Jim Wertz has been making similar points about prizes for some time now. Small prizes allow non-traditional ideas to be tried. Large prizes become exercises in fundraising, whoever is the first to raise the minimum amount (say, to pay for a launch vehicle in this case), wins.
As with almost everything in life (or engineering) the question: “What’s the best way to do X?” Is always answered in the same way: “It depends.”
As, prizes are nothing new as the X-Prize Foundation claims, the mechanics are well known. The key is to keep the goal within the 3F funding range (family, friends and fools). Then you maximize creativity and have best chance of actually pushing the technology forward. The Longitude Prize is a good example, anyone with clock making skills had a reasonable chance of winning it IF they were clever enough. And it was opened enough that non-clock solutions (transit tables of Jupiter Moons for example) had an opportunity as well.
It’s likely any chance of the GLXP getting won in the original timeframe went when Falcon 1e was cancelled.
I seriously doubt that the 1e had the ability to throw anything to the moon, let alone one of these lander and the rockets needed.
At this time, both of these companies need to be pushing for the FH to go to demo and ride that up. I suspect that it would be ideal for both of them, and SpaceX. The FH is able to take ~15-17 tonnes to TLI. That would make it possible for several of these groups to at least get to TLI and then have to drop onto the moon (good luck to them).
But right now, SpaceX is paying for their demo. If they can get the GLXP, that at least saves them some money.
“15-17 tonnes to TLI” -> you must be talking of the doubly expensive version of FH. The cheap version only does 6.5 to GTO.
Really? What prices do they charge for the 2 different versions?
Using the wayback machine, we can see an earlier version of their website.
https://web.archive.org/web…
<=6.4mT GTO = $77.1M
>6.4mT GTO = $135M
So not quite double, but still a huge difference. Since then they removed the >6.4 listing and increased the 6.4mT to $85M. I guess they removed >6.4mT because they dislike dual launch requests.
No, that was with 2 sats going up. IOW, they split the launch costs, plus their own individual packing costs.
Basically, it is still one FH. One is shared in the same way that ArianeSpace does, while the others is 100% under your control.
When has SpaceX said they were offering FH as a dual satellite launcher like Ariane 5? I have seen them say they want to avoid dual launches a few times, and their only fairing seems a little small to do Ariane 5 style dual launches.
Huh. So even now with spacex launching multiple SATs from f9, you think that they will not launch from FH? And the spacex fairing is roughly the same size as arianne 5’s for doubles.
What “multiple SATs from f9” has SpaceX done like Ariane 5 does?
There is a big difference between little SATs piggybacking on a ride with a primary versus Arianne 5 which has both satellites as the primary. Elon said SpaceX does not do the little secondaries to make money.
Where did I say that a smaller launch system was done like arianne 5?
I said that spacex has launched multiples. In addition, do ubreally think that spacex will charge less for FH without another load being there?
>Where did I say that a smaller launch system was done like arianne 5?
You said “No, that was with 2 sats going up” … “shared in the same way that ArianeSpace does”. And then later said “even now with spacex launching multiple SATs from f9, you think that they will not launch from FH”.
First you compared Ariane 5 to FH, then you made the point about F9 doing multiple satellites launches to back up your point for FH doing like Ariane 5. If you are denying they are similar, then F9 point is irrelevant.
I know FH will have some launches with multiple satellites, eg STP 2. But these are not like Ariane 5.
> spacex will charge less for FH without another load being there?
Not sure what you mean. They can charge less for the <6.4mT if it allows them to skip cross-feeding and return cores. For “2 sats going up” like Ariane it would greatly increase SpaceX costs.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers. The SpaceX website lists the FH payload to GTO as 21.2 MT. The Falcon 9 alone is rated at nearly 5 MT to GTO.
http://www.spacex.com/about…
“$85M Up to 6.4 mT to GTO”
You have to use an internet archive to see a price for the >6.4 mT to GTO (aka up to 21.2 mT), since they they removed its price when they raised the “Up to 6.4 mT” price. Before it was removed the prices were $77.1M and $135M.
I believe this article is out of date. It was recently announced within the last two weeks that the timeline to achieve a landing had been extended into 2016. I admit I never heard the target date. Does anyone know if this is true or not?
you are correct.
http://www.engadget.com/201…
I’m not really sure what you are trying to say. The article here, and the linked one at IEE Spectrum say the same thing regarding the deadlines as you do. So what exactly is out of date? *confused*
the first sentence of this article has been edited to fix his mistakes, that is why your confused.
Contrast this and Ansari with the DARPA/Army Grand/Urban Challenges. Smaller prizes but more often. Multiple contests allowed teams to develop their technology, see what worked, develop a competition culture. Over a few years, teams could go from complete failure to winning. And as a result, the overall vehicle technology developed rapidly, from the first year when no team finished even a quarter of the course.
And it worked well in the glove challenge (as an example). Multi year contests are great when the entire design can be changed in weeks. But when a vehicle architecture gets locked down and now you are stuck with it for years (decades Shuttle?)… it gets more complicated.
I know I’m restating the obvious, but what is the incremental contest NASA or others SHOULD be doing? Lunar lander was similar (but still too high a hurdle) and one company is closed and the other is still looking for contracts to stay alive.
Any ideas for a better solution? The collegiate lunar rover challenge is basically designing recumbent bicycles. Should we start a cubesat challenge? Something that can be iterated? Even the glove challenge suffers from the fact that hundreds or thousands of people aren’t in the market for space gloves!
With the Grand Challenge, DARPA set up the course. If Google REALLY wanted this to succeed, they needed to “set up the course”, or buy a launch vehicle every 2 years to take everyone’s lander to the Moon. Yeah it’s ridiculous, but is the competition about lunar landers and rovers or is it about securing the funding for a launch vehicle. A Falcon 9 every 2 years until the contest is won, not outside the realm of possibility for Google.
Yes, all it is about is getting the money for a launch vehicle. Its not about the technology.
The best plan would be to hold a competition to design lunar rovers able to do a number of specific tasks as a predetermined landing site. Have annual contests on Earth to pick the best each one each year with $1 million in prize money, than after 3 or 4 iterations give the winning team $2 million and pay to have their rover delivered to the Moon. Then give the winning team 25% of the revenue from the mission.
To some extent, X-Prize’s reputation is on the line. They are the leading prize organization yet how well do they understand how to run prizes successfully? No one winning the prize is not a success.
I think that they may have set their sights too high. They chose a costly challenge and offered less of a reward than it would probably cost to achieve it. Participants would have to spend painful amounts of money for only the CHANCE of winning the prize. Yet they might end up crashing and losing it all. All that risk for a chance at capturing a “market” which is considerably more uncertain than the Ansari X-Prize’s suborbital tourism demand. Late in the game, X-Prize offered milestone payments which would help participants make progress without having to go so far out on a limb.
I have no solutions for the GLXP but perhaps X-Prize should focus on smaller challenges which contestants could afford to lose in the attempt.
If SpaceX or another competitor firm were to nail down reusablity and we saw launch prices plummet, a new Lunar X-Prize challenge would be a totally different event. Raising 10 million versus 70+ ( Falcon 9 and intergration, et cetera).
Good point. Do remember that Elon promised to sell F9 flights to GLXP contestants for “at cost” prices whatever that might be.
Maybe the lunar prize is the wrong way to go
The original prize was about re-usability, but it was only 3 times.
That allowed Scaled to ‘cheat’ and focus on just doing enough.
Maybe a bigger X prize for say 1x/week for 10 weeks might be worth 50 million?
Or perhaps 1x / month to orbit for 5 months might be worth the 50-75 million?
In the end, I love the lunar prize, but what is killing it, is the same thing killing space access: economics.
None of these teams have ever flown so much as a cubesat. Lunar landing ? Not going to happen for so many reasons, with funding only a small part of the issue.
Did anyone notice that a private lunar flyby mission just flew a couple months ago ? Maybe Google should send a small check to Luxembourg ..
What annoys me about all this is that Astrobotic and Barcelona Moon Team have been saying they’ve got launches, and a date for those launches, for years now. Turns out they don’t. I asked about this on the GLXP facebook page and predictably got no reply, (I was polite!).
This is turning into the ooooold space story where a company launches with great fanfare, presentations and regular updates about what they’re doing and how close it all is and how revolutionary it will be, and then as time goes by, schedules slip and everyone clams up. Finally everything slowly goes away and we don’t hear any more. I hope it’s not going to be this way but its really not looking promising at this point.
As usual Doug is one of the few asking the hard questions rather than mindlessly cheerleading from the side. Well done 🙂
Thanks.
One thing that did occur is that the two teams took opposite directions. Astrobotic went with a large lander hoping to sell space on it to afford the launch. Moon Express went with a smaller one that could probably be launched as a secondary payload if they can find the right match. So, cost would be more affordable.
A lot of those small ‘New Space’ companies are fund-riders. The company exist to get funding. Many use some of the millions flowing into this ‘new’ industry from various governments; others abuse the goodwill of enthusiasts on places like Kickstarter – there are 97 space exploration projects on Kickstarter (of various quality and level of funding).
Forget the launches. Do they have their licenses in order? And are they building ground stations? Those require almost as much lead time as launches.
I do have to wonder about 1 thing.
How is it that groups like Armadillo have spent 100’s of thousands to 10’s of millions with loads of tests making sure that they can take off, maneuver, and then land safely (which is the hardest part of the challenge) while these 2 are not undergoing anywhere near the testing that they did?
Unless they got the systems from any of the companies like Armadillo, how do they know that their works?
What Armadillo did was at a different level. They never built a spacecraft. They built pretty cool rockets, but rockets are not spacecraft, although often spacecraft have some rockets attached to them.
The difficulty of what Armadillo did vs what is required for landing on the moon is kind of like building a wooden sailboat vs building a full up diesel submarine.
Armadillo built heuristics for controlling rockets via automation. That is why they had a safety harness on it. Landing on the moon demands either a local person or controller. So, how will the other 2 do it?
Do not forget Team India who might send their rover on a PSLV
I would add launching a craft into orbit ( at least 400 miles up or no more than say 150 miles), doing enough orbits to equal the time for getting to the moon, and then landing at one of the poles or a deserted atol away from everything, under power with no chutes. Obviously, it would need a heat shield, but, all the rest is needed for landing on the moon.
That would actually be far harder. Once you are in orbit it would be easier to go on to the Moon than to land under power on Earth. An simple ion propulsion unit will get you out of Earth orbit.
go to the moon and then land it on it, is likely to be harder.
Besides, I was thinking about it, and realized that for a decent simulation, a simple sounding rocket that takes you up to a set altitude might provide all that is needed for testing landing on the moon.
Not really, as you don’t have wind on the Moon and the lower gravity gives you more control when landing.
Hi Doug,
Actually it has been tried several times before. Lunacorp of Pittsburgh which was created over a decade earlier was the first to seriously propose a lunar mission. Many of the founders are now associated with Astrobotic.
The second firm would have been from San Diego called International Space
Enterprises. Its CEO, Michael Simon, quickly realized that until that $100
million first step could be conquered there was no viable business model and
the firm is now known as Transpower specializing in electric drive systems for industrial vehicles. Their business plan was to build a park themed around their lunar rover.
Lunar Applications from the Bay Area would be the third venture, a plan to bring back a lunar sample to sell to collectors.
It was followed by Transorbital, also from San Diego under the late Dennis Laurie. It was the only lunar firm that actually succeeded in getting the necessary licenses and permits for a lunar mission, something the Google teams are ignoring, another reason why I don’t take the Google X Prize as serious.
SpaceDev from San Diego also was planning a lunar venture before Blast-Off. There were going to work with Steve Durst to place a telescope on the Moon. I have heard stories (unconfirmed) that Google was very close to financing this mission
before Peter Diamandis sold them a bill of goods that lead them down the failed Google X-Prize route. If they had funded it a private lander would have reached
the Moon in the 2009-2010 time frame. This would also be similar to the Ansari
X-Prize where a billionaire, Paul Allen, was funding a private spacecraft before
the offer of a prize detoured the entire venture into a dead end.
BTW, Peter Diamandis, venture Blast-Off, was the one that lasted the least amount of time because of its link to the dot.com bubble.
The one barrier to all these missions has been raising the $100 million in capital needed to launch a rover to the Moon. Also, have been involved closely with a
another private lunar venture at the time that never went public, and knowing the folks involved in several of these ventures its important to realize that technology
was never the real issue. Any college robotics class could easily build a lunar rover provided you didn’t expect it to last through a lunar night without a RTG. I know because we were going to have college students build are lander as part of the education driven business model for it. I was also involved at the the with the ASCE competitions for lunar robotics. You would be amazed at the quality of not only the college built rovers, but even a couple entered by high school teams. It would take money to get them up to the standards needed for launching to the Moon, but not as much as one would expect.
As for the lander technology it been around since the 1960’s and two major aerospace firms I met with indicated they would have no problem building a lunar lander to order for a modest price Provided NASA was not involved in any shape or form and they could freeze the design early using off the shelf components. The other big ticket item beyond the lander and launch vehicle would have been something not even being discussed by the Google X-Prize teams, which is the communication system including one or more ground stations. That is also a long lead time item, perhaps even more so than buying a launch vehicle or getting your licenses and permits in order.
good synopsis.
But, I have to wonder why they hate NASA?
Up until the GOP pushed NASA to force the documentation on SpaceX, it appeared that SpaceX, and others, benefited from NASA’s work, and collective knowledge.
They don’t hate NASA. They just understand from experience that any involvement by NASA drives the cost way up. That is because NASA is not happy with existing technology, they have to the newest and best. That costs both time and money, and time is money in business. Plus the best and latest means changes will need to be made to the design, lots of changes. And each one must be justified, approved, the approval reviewed and the review of the justification approved approved by someone else while all the records are filled out. One of the individuals joked that when working with NASA they figure hiring three workers to do the documentation for each individual actually doing physical work on the hardware… That is why a $50 million lander becomes a $500 million one when they bid on a NASA contract, they already figure those costs into it.
SpaceX Dragon is a good example. Originally Elon Musk claimed he could build it for a couple of hundred million and fly it in 2012. Now, thanks to NASA’s “help” it will be 2017 before it flies and has a cost of development on the high sign of $3 billion.
Actually no. Most of that 3 billion is for delivery, and the extras that the gop insisted on to try and stop spacex.
You will note that spacex could easily launch humans this year, but their focus is on reusability, launch pads, and FH.
As such, they are coasting on human launches.
Of course they are coasting because that way they will be able to milk more money out of Uncle Sugar if they do. Imagine if Elon Musk had gone ahead and flown a crewed Dragon in 2012 as he originally stated he would. All the CCP would be lost. SpaceX learned the government contracting game real fast. And yes, the Phase 2 includes flight testing and up to “6 operational flights” but actually those are test flightswith humans aboard.