10 thoughts on “A Preview Of The New Space Age”

  2. It is nice to see the commercial sector picking this up since NASA has been busy with their MSL monster rover for Mars and does not seem to have the budget to do anything else. What the heck happened to the lots of cheap missions they used to do?

  3. PS: Now that NASA has access to the Falcon 9 and hopefully will have Antares soon as well I think they should be reconsidering this strategy of the monster missions that ate the budget to doing more missions with less money per mission.

  4. What’s all this science crap? Lunar robot soccer! Let every university have a team. All teams must be within a specific total mass range but anything goes beyond that (lot’s of small robots or a few big ones? Kick or carry?) Sunday night soccer; brought to you by which ever advertiser is willing to pay. Of course, the first order of business is deciding on the official lunar soccer ball (able to handle lunar extremes and retain it’s bounce.) Then how far apart the goals will be. Cameras everywhere of course.

  5. I remembered when the teams had to land by 2012.

    http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=03300316K1J9

    [[[In a stunning expansion of the private funding of space exploration, Google said it is funding a contest to put a robotic rover on the moon by 2012. ]]]

    I guess like sub-orbital tourism its always in a few years in the future.

    Its a pity that Google didn’t simply fund a private expedition with the money. After all we are not talking breakthrough here given the Russians sent a rover there 40 years ago. Its just straight forward engineering. The problem is Google is only paying about 40% of what the actual cost of doing it is.

    What folks don’t realize is the problem is not building the rover, any good high science team could probably do so given the results I used to see at the ASCE lunar robotics contests in the early 2000’s, nor building the lander, given how quickly NASA put Surveyor together 50 years ago. Its simply finding the money to buy the launch vehicle needed.

  6. I’ve thought of a prize that will get us to Mars for $50 billion. Take $50 billion dollars in cash, divide it up into tough Pelican cases, launch it all the way to Mars, and say “Finders keepers.”

    1. George,

      The problem is by the time someone reaches it will probably be worth only 50 cents. Now if you are talking about sending $50 billion in gold to Mars its a different story 🙂

  7. For me the pity was the Google didn’t offer a prize big enough that would have started an absolute FIERCE competition to win it.

  8. I would have rather seen it more like a lottery prize.

    The winning team receives:

    10 million a year for 20 years or 30 – 40 million in cash.
    20 million a year for 10 years or 30 – 40 million in cash.

    Something on those lines.

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