X-Prize? | Lunar lander design | Forum

Now that we're starting to talk about branching into different sub-groups, I think it's prudent to discuss this a little bit. I know the x-prize isn't directly in our goals, but at the same time I wouldn't say no to $10M and some recognition. We'll be putting an unmanned craft on the moon at some point as part of our testing; my thought is that if we can allocate a bit of payload on it, we can have a team build a rover that meets the qualifications for the x-prize. They could even work mostly as an independent group, from our side it would just be a payload, to be replaced by a human capsule on a later mission. From the team's perspective, they wouldn't need to worry about any of the rocketry, just building a rover that can complete the x-prize tasks once on the moon.

The only downside I can see is that the x-prize timeline may not line up well with our own, and I don't think it's worth drastically modifying our schedule to try and pull this off.

What do you think? Is this worth including as a goal for our project. Even just being registered as a team could bring some more attention to our effort, and I see that as a good thing. But I'm sure there are lots of pros and cons that I haven't thought about yet.

Post edited 12:51 pm – November 21, 2009 by Rocket-To-The-Moon

I think this is definitely something to look into. It would be silly to develop all of this capability without claiming a $20 million prize (only until December 31, 2012) to help offset the development costs. It says that 90% must be privately funded, I assume that donations would count as begin privately funded, but we would have to limit our commercial sponsorship then (limiting funds sounds like a stupid idea). It does look like we are coming in a little bit late in the game though.

If only we had several dozen people in one location! Hopefully time will provide that. Maybe I need to bite the bullet and try contacting the University of North Dakota, I know they have an array of engineering disciplines. 

http://www.googlelunarxprize.o…..-the-prize

Here is the form to request the registration forms. Since you have the info@cstart.org email account I guess you can fill it out and request the form. We have until December 31, 2010 to register, but it can't hurt to register early so that we have additional motivation. This keeps getting more exciting every day.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.o…..guidelines