Gadgetory

45 years ago an Apollo rocket launched here at the Kennedy Space Center completed its moon shot and won the space race for America it was a 25 billion dollar investment by the US government that's one hundred and sixty five billion dollars in today's money but just three years and six lunar landings later we lost interest it wasn't until 2013 when China Lena the Chang III rover on the moon that humanity returned to the lunar surface but that was a state-funded project that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and was ultimately unsuccessful with no competition to spur us on humanity's interest in the moon cooled but things were starting to heat up there's a new competition a new space race a 30 million dollar Google Lunar XPrize independent teams are racing to collective the winner of the Google Lunar XPrize has to complete three criteria first and most important being actually landing on the moon once there needs to cover 500 meters either on above or even below the lunar surface and all the while needs to be broadcasting back high-definition video to those of us stuck here on earth the first team to do that gets 20 million dollars a nice chunk of change but just a fraction of the money they're gonna have to spend to get to the moon in the first place second place team if there is one we'll get five million dollars well the last five million dollars to the 30 million dollar purse it split up into optional challenges things like surveying historic locations on the moon and covering extra distance thirty three teams were entered into the Google Lunar XPrize and of those just five were selected for the so-called milestone prizes that six million dollars awarded to those teams that can demonstrate that they have the technology and the know-how to land on the moon this is the story of those five teams first is Astrobotic a Pittsburgh Pennsylvania based team with strong ties to Carnegie Mellon University Astrobotic was spun out from Carnegie Mellon in 2007 we are located in a strip district in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania about five minutes from Carnegie Mellon Astrobotic has taken an approach of the being what I would call a large cargo carrier they're actually looking to take a number of other teams with them to the lunar surface they're trying to to take a large Lander that could also be used for future cargo missions so it's very interesting commercial development which should come out of this it's actually far more complicated than just unloading a few Rovers we hope to release some of these payloads in orbit some of them want to land we're going to release some payloads in translunar after translunar injection as we fly towards the moon and then we want to release some of the rover's on the ground so we have to come up with a model that takes all of that into account not just the ground race that's going to happen when we drop all the vehicles off I think Astrobotic is gonna do great things we want to prove that we can land precisely and accurately while avoiding all the hazards so for me personally I'd really like to see my software be useful for pinpoint landing that's really exciting I'm the only woman here at Mastan and Astrobotic so that's kind of exciting to inspire women and girls to follow their passions and explore career and contribute to the state of art of space exploration computer vision so our goal is to secrete extend humanity's reach into space create a sustainable economy and ecosystem that can work there and as that cost comes down it gets that much closer and then we can turn the moon into the 8th continent team hakuto is based on homage to japan and has some very interesting Rover designs the technical team is located in Tohoku University which is a city of Sendai a nose up Tokyo and the business team is mostly located in Tokyo area XPrize gave us a very unique opportunity to bring our Rovers and demonstrate the mobility but our final goal is to contribute to the science Cocteau's solution to the XPrize requirements is Moonraker the larger the two they have a secondary set of objectives that don't have anything to do with XPrize and that is to look into what are termed lava tubes on the on the moon it used to be used to be volcanic activities on the surface of the Moon the rubber floor build number of the underground tiles and as some of the tunnels has you know small boy or horse so very unique nice access hole to the underground tunnels so then first we complete the 500 meter trouble and approaching to the edge of the hole then as an option if we use this Taser system to make an underground exploration as they're attached by tether so out the back of this rover a tether attaches to the second rover and it's designed to tow the smaller one so the second rover has the ability to go down a cliff side and then pull itself back up and also there is such an underground structures it's so natural structure should be useful for the future human habitation well I don't know what they're going to find but it will be really interesting when they do where's a weawy in the exploit or not we're gonna continue to our journey team in this is based in New Delhi India and they're sending not one but two Rovers to the moon so for us it's about completing the mission completing the engineering you know qualifying the hardware getting onto a rocket landing on the moon finishing that track the team was formed by me and a bunch of business associates back in 2010 that's when we found out about Google Lunar XPrize we were looking to work with any other team from India because of restrictions around technology so on so forth when we found out that there is no team from India we decided to put one up on our own our Rover is small so it's it's four wheel all four wheels are power different two videos are staring it has a collapsible mast it is powered using solar panels relatively small overall dimensions would be you know it's it's it's about you know half a meter by half meter by forty centimeters so it's it's almost a cube that would fly on top of the London and once it is deployed the mast comes out and gives us a hand in a height of almost one meter it's almost 10 years since Ansari X PRIZE and and it's about time so I think that would be the one big visible you know step towards consumers getting into space and that would automatically have a ripple effect and more and more people thinking that there's a lot more that can be done in space that can be done with space moon express is another American team based in Mountain View California they have some pretty lofty goals for the future of commercial space exploration so we're here at the Kennedy Space Center where humanity went to the moon and it's a great honor for us to be not only standing on the shoulders of giants but working shoulder-to-shoulder with our NASA colleagues and learning a lot and there's a new era evolving now and as behind US government spaceships reach out to space here at the slf private spaceships are being built and our little team of 50 people given the support of NASA and the camaraderie that we're experiencing and the incentive of the moon we're built developing and testing our vehicle today there's one sixth of Earth's gravity on the moon and that provides a lot of challenges for traction and mobility and that means that your mass of your Rover should be six times as much to get the same traction so we thought well there's no atmosphere so there's no aerodynamic forces there's less gravity and if we landed once should be able to land again and flying is the best option and so we're going to hop our mission is going to hop 500 meters and during that hop we also have an opportunity to reorient our solar panels to take advantage of wherever the Sun might be during that day wherever possible we use consumer technology and upscaler to upgrade it to space qualification this is real change from what's usually done traditionally in space where you only fly would you flown before well there's no opportunity for innovation when you do that so with imaging we're going to be using some commercial cameras that we've modified and environmentally tested and this will be very cool because they are extremely capable and relatively inexpensive and we'll be flying these things for the first time to another world and when we announce what those cameras are I think people be pretty excited about it writing software for an application is gonna go so far away I mean it starts off with a little unreal until you start making more and more progress and realizing like oh man we're gonna have to actually let this thing go at some point finally team time's scientist is based in Berlin Germany but they have team members located all around the world the idea for getting started was to part-time scientists came basically when the last announcement for participants was sent out by Google I think by that time the competition was already running like two years or so and they were still looking for new teams and I said okay if we want to take part in this competition then he got one more week to apply and up to this point I have never heard about the j-league speak so that was really what got me interested and I was looking at it and I was really thinking like why the hell is Google Earth can I say this okay so I was really thinking like why the heck is Google giving away 40 million u.s. dollars for something to be sent to the moon so after talking to other people I noticed that 30 million is actually not it doesn't even cut it for the entire mission cars and yeah that's what was fascinated me was to try to get it done in a cheaper way because when I saw the numbers said usual space missions take place I really saw that it makes sense to lower the mark so we're here at the D fki and this is a German nonprofit Institute for robotics and artificial intelligence research one of the labs that they have here is this artificial moonscape which is useful for testing robotic systems which one day would operate on the moon this moon scape has a few interesting properties one of them is that it's optically realistic so they have the right color and the right formation of the surface to give the shadowing effects and the lighting effects that a camera on the moon would actually be looking at our goal is actually to conduct at least two more missions and a five to seven year time scale and the reason for this is because I believe what is important is to build up infrastructure that others can utilize for example if we put a like an LTE base station on the moon to speak it a little bit simple and we provide a high gigabit uplink back to earth for a laser link for example then other missions future missions could use a simple small chip in their components to link into this base station instead of having own communication solution which requires a whole lot of power and mass to dial back to earth the reason why I believe this entire Google XPrize and pop time scientist is pretty awesome at least for me and for most of the people on our team is that you you get to learn so much more things that you would have never come in contact with in your normal life it's the next great space race it's happening now in our next video we'll show you highlights from those tests as the team's prepare to go on their 20 million dollar moonshot I'm Tim Stevens Racine head covering the Google Lunar XPrize