The entrepreneurial space industry has been big supporters—and beneficiaries—of prizes, from the Ansari X PRIZE and the Google Lunar X PRIZE to NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program. Now it looks the latter is going to get a lot more robust. After several years of not getting any funding, Centennial Challenges got $4 million [...]
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Better late than never: I was in Mojave this morning to see Masten Space Systems make their first attempt to claim second prize of Level One of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. (I didn’t make a special trip to California to see it; I was already in the area to attend the AIAA Space 2009 conference in Pasadena [...] In today’s issue of The Space Review I have a summary article about Saturday’s Level 2 flights by Armadillo, including video of both flights. While that was going on, though, other teams have been making progress on their flights. On Sunday, Masten Space Systems announced via Twitter that they made two 90+second test flightsdespite [...] Here’s a video I shot of Armadillo’s first leg of the Level 2 flight on Saturday. This was shot from a distance of about 1,500 feet from the pads, the designated safety boundary. This is considerably closer than the distance the public and media witnessed similar LLC flights in past years. Armadillo managed to beat the weather and any technical gremlins on Saturday with a pair of successful Level 2 flights, ensuring that they at least qualify for the prize. (Because of the nature of the competition, they won’t know until the end of October, when the competition season closes, if in fact they have won [...] I’m in the Dallas area this weekend to (hopefully) see Armadillo Aerospace compete in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Level 2 category. The “hopefully” is less associated with any technical issues–they’ve flown their “Super Mod” vehicle a number of times on the pads they’ve built at the Caddo Mills Municipal Airport northeast [...] Pity poor Emma Morris, a 27-year-old publicist from Melbourne, Australia. Or not. You see, she’s a winner of a contest by Australian airline Virgin Blue that awarded her 25 million points, enough to be redeemed for a flight on Virgin Galactic. However, she can also use the points for two Alfa Romeo Spider [...] This year the Lunar Lander Challenge competition that is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program is being run differently: rather than a single once-a-year event in New Mexico, each team can decide when and where they will compete during a competition window that opened July 20 and runs through October 31. At another [...] As the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was winding down, I was able to sit down and talk with John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace for several minutes. Below is the video from that interview, where Carmack discusses what happened with Pixel on Saturday, his plans for the future (which begin with tracking down [...] |
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