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| Image Credit: hkeita/Shutterstock |
Five teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE have
just been awarded a combined $5.25 million for meeting significant
milestones in developing a robot that can safely land on the surface of
the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send mooncasts
back to the Earth. A tiny startup from India, Team Indus, with no
experience in robotics or space flight just won $1 million of this
prize. It stood head to head with companies that had been funded by
billionaires, had received the assistance of NASA, and had the support
of leading universities.
The good news is that governments no longer have a monopoly on space
exploration. In two or three decades, we will have entrepreneurs taking
us on private spaceflights to the moon. That is what has become
possible.
What has changed since the days of the Apollo moon landings is that
the cost of building technologies has dropped exponentially. What cost
billions of dollars then costs millions now, and sometimes even less.
Our smartphones have computers that are more powerful than the Cray
supercomputers of yesteryear — which had strict export controls and cost
tens of millions of dollars. We carry high-definition cameras in our
pockets that are more powerful than those on NASA spacecraft. The
cameras in the Mars Curiosity Rover, for example, have a resolution of 2
megapixels with 8GB of flash memory, the same as our clunky
first-generation iPhones. The Apollo Guidance Computer, which took
humans to the moon in 1966, had a 2.048 MHz processor — slower than
those you find in calculators and musical greeting cards.
The same technologies as are available in the United States and Europe are available worldwide. Innovation has globalized.
I met Team Indus while I was in Mumbai to speak at INK last November.
When they told me they were competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I
didn’t take them seriously because I had seen their counterpart in
Silicon Valley, Moon Express, which has the support of tech moguls such
as Naveen Jain. How could a scrawny little startup in Bangalore take on
Naveen Jain, former NASA engineer Bob Richards, and NASA itself, I
thought. The Moon Express team is a force of nature, has the advantage
of being on the NASA Ames Research campus, and has been given R&D
worth billions of dollars by NASA.
Team Indus was also up against Astrobotic, which is a spinoff from
the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Israel-based
SpaceIL, which has the backing of the country’s top research institutes.
The company’s win blew my mind. Even though the subject of my INK
talk was how Indian entrepreneurs could help change the world, I didn’t
think it was already happening.
(See my Jan. 1 story on the Indian tech scene and watch this talk to learn more: Why India shouldn’t be succeeding but is.)
The Bangalore-based startup was founded by former I.T. executive
Rahul Narayan and four of his friends: an Air Force pilot, a marketing
executive, an investment banker, and an aerospace engineer. None of the
team had experience in building spacecraft or robots, yet they were able
to build technology that could navigate to the moon.
Narayan says he expects completion of his space mission to cost
around $30 million. Moon Express chief executive Bob Richards estimates
$50 million. These numbers are higher than the $20 million prize that
they hope to win. But both see far greater opportunities: They hope to
be pioneers in what could be a trillion-dollar industry. Richards is
looking to mine the moon for minerals and bring them back to Earth. Each
payload could be worth billions.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE has 26 teams competing
from around the world. Collectively, they will spend in the hundreds of
millions of dollars on their efforts. For them, it is not all about
winning the contest; many of the losers will still commercialize their
space technologies or put their knowledge to use in other fields. This
is the power of such competitions. They lead entrants to spend multiples
of the offered purse on innovative solutions. And they motivate people
outside the industry, such as Narayan, to enter it with out-of-the-box
thinking.
Innovation prizes are not new. In fact, a number of celebrated
historical feats were made possible, in part, by the desire to win these
prizes. In the 1920s, New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered a
$25,000 prize to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and
Paris. Several unsuccessful attempts were made before an American
airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won the competition in 1927 with
his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis.
Lindbergh’s achievement
made him a national hero and a global celebrity. And it sparked the
interest and investment that led to the modern aviation industry.
That is what I expect will come of the Lunar XPRIZE. And that is why I
am looking forward to booking my round-trip ticket to the moon one
summer in the 2030s.
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AscensionEarth2012/~3/RxPdHOILLPc/with-innovators-from-around-globe.html
With innovators from around the globe digging in, public moon travel may be only 20 years away
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