wpomerantz's blog

First and foremost, a hearty congratulations to the Mars Phoenix team for their discovery. I think it is awesome that it first came out via Twitter. This is a monumental event, and one I hope people take time to ponder...

The Google Lunar X PRIZE was the subject of a nice article on CNN today. It's a good article, although I wish it hadn't ended by talking about Moon hoaxes.

NASA also has a nice article up on my personal favorite Apollo mission, Apollo 12, and specifically on the visit to Surveyor 3. Those people interested in the ethical issues about whether or not future missions should be allowed to approach historical past missions should surely consider this case study of the Apollo 12 mission. As the NASA article states:

On their second four-hour EVA, Bean and Conrad walked over to Surveyor 3, took dozens of photographs and measurements, and began snipping off parts of metal tubing and electrical cables. They retrieved a camera. The very last thing they removed was a small scoop at the end of Surveyor's extendable arm, which had dug into the dry moon dust and gravel to make mechanical measurements of lunar soil. .. [Back on Earth, these] were analyzed and then put in storage. ... And there matters quietly lay ... until recently when researchers at NASA's Glenn Research Center (GRC) realized that that little scoop could hold big secrets.

Namely, the secrets of digging on the Moon

It's clear that the Apollo 12 mission has done a lot of good that couldn't be accomplished if the astronauts hadn't been able to approach Surveyor 3. But it's also clear that anyone discussing approaching any heritage site will have to carefully consider the ethics of approaching and potentially disturbing a priceless, unique treasure.

As I've stated before, it's exciting to have a cause to have this discussion. It's a likely to be a lengthy one, and one that happens in many places, but here's a good place to start. I hope you'll chime in with your thoughts!

I've seen a number of comments lately about a blog post by Bob Cringely over at PBS. People have commented about how the Cringely team "dropped out" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE (that’s hard to do when you haven’t officially joined!). In any case, we are disappointed not to have Team Cringely involved in the competition and we wish them the best of luck in their efforts to get to the Moon. If they are successful in their ambitious plans, the staff of the X PRIZE Foundation will be among their most ardent supporters.

While I do sincerely wish Mr. Cringely luck, I also want to address some statements in his post.

[W]hile the X [PRIZE] Foundation released early on preliminary rules for the competition, they said the final rules wouldn't be cast in stone for another 20 months. For Team Cringely, with our very aggressive development schedule, this meant that we'd be landing on the Moon before the rules were finalized. We could win the contest only to find out that we were disqualified from receiving the prize. That's a hard one to explain to potential investors or sponsors. It still isn't clear why the X [PRIZE] Foundation feels the need to wait so long to finalize the rules, but they seem firm on this issue, which negates completely one of the strategic advantages of Team Cringely, which is essentially time to market.

By publishing a "95% solution," we have allowed teams to begin working in good faith, while still leaving ourselves a window to consider feedback from our registered teams, for which they have been generally appreciative. We have listened to our teams. In his post, Mr. Cringely omits a change detailed in the most recent version of the Guidelines which notes that the Guidelines may be finalized "as early as August 1, 2008." It’s true that teams do incur some risk by actively pursuing this prize while the rules are not 100% final, but we feel that the opportunity for teams to offer feedback on the rules strongly outweighs this risk.

He is also factually incorrect in his statement. The deadline he quotes is actually a "no later than" date, not a "no earlier than" date as implied. This distinction is clearly spelled out in the Official Guidelines Q&A, a document Mr. Cringley references later in his post.

The X [PRIZE] Foundation also required that rovers carry an "instrument package" weighing no more than 500 grams. We at Team Cringely came to call this the "bowling trophy," which we'd need to super glue to our one-kilogram rover. A pound of bowling trophy might mean very little to Carnegie Mellon University with its 500 lb. rover (and $100 million budget), but to Team Cringely it was a deal killer. More recently the rules have softened a bit to require that the bowling trophy be no more than a certain percentage of the vehicle weight, but we could never figure out why it was required at all. Couldn't we just paint X [PRIZE] logos on our rovers and be done with it? No explanation.

Mr. Cringely is correct that the requirement of carrying additional payload is indeed a difficult one. It is a difficult requirement by design. A key goal of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is to enable a new generation of systems that provide affordable lunar access. If a company cannot carry even a modest payload measured in the low 100s of grams, they will not have achieved this goal. Their mission will still have been a worthy achievement, but it will not have attained the goals of this prize, a fact accepted by our registered teams, including the teams that are designing extremely miniaturized rovers.

With this modest amount of payload, we have an opportunity to fulfill another of the X PRIZE Foundation’s major goals: education and outreach. This small amount of payload will be utilized to reach and inspire children and adults everywhere. It doesn't take much imagination to think of some great programs that will be enabled by this small payload.

But the biggest obstacle of all for Team Cringely was the X [PRIZE] Foundation's insistence that only it could come to agreement for commercial media coverage of the contest. Team Cringely couldn't cut its own TV deal, nor could it even make its own TV show if that was intended to be done for substantial revenue. That would be handled by the X [PRIZE] Foundation on behalf of all teams with coverage and revenue equally shared. While that position sounds egalitarian, it isn't. The X [PRIZE] Foundation has no significant experience in media licensing -- certainly they have less than we have at Team Cringely where we've sold TV shows over many years to more than 50 countries.

Here again, Mr. Cringely is factually incorrect. At no point does the X PRIZE Foundation state that the media revenue will be split between the teams equally. Indeed, the letter from which he quotes explicitly states that teams will receive different coverage and different portions of the revenue, with the winning team claiming the largest share of the net proceeds.

Regarding Mr. Cringely's claim to have more media experience: let this be a lesson about the dangers of assumptions! I’m sure that Mr. Cringely's assertion that we have "no significant experience in media licensing" would surprise the veteran Hollywood producer and the former manager of marketing for the Olympics on our staff.

In addition, the recently published Guidelines note that the "X PRIZE Foundation is hiring a major international agency to represent its competitions in the packaging and sale of television and other media rights." This agency was introduced to the teams at the Team Summit two weeks ago. Mr. Cringely quotes that exact sentence on the media agency, but offers no comment on it, commenting instead on another paragraph from the X PRIZE Foundation's guidelines revision cover letter, which talks about the need for one entity to combine and collectively market the content from multiple teams. Discussing an analogy that cover draws to the Olympics. Mr. Cringely says:

The problem with the Olympics analogy is that it doesn't hold up. There isn't one media deal for the Olympics, there is one media deal PER COMPETING COUNTRY -- PER TEAM. NBC doesn't buy the rights to broadcast the Olympics in Japan. And NBC's coverage is biased toward its own market, which means mainly covering the U.S. team, just as a Japanese broadcaster would have its own Olympic contract and would bias its coverage toward the Japanese team.

There is a clear misunderstanding of the Olympics analogy. While he is correct that there are multiple media deals which cover the different markets, all of those media deals are controlled by one central body--the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC does not allow each competing country’s team to broker their own media deals Just as happens with the IOC, working through a centralized media-collecting body in this competition helps us to ensure quality coverage of the competition.

We even reached out to Google, which appeared to be aware of the issues and uncomfortable with the performance of the X [PRIZE] Foundation, but friendships were involved and Google is not a fast-moving organization anyway, so we got no help there.

I can’t speak to Mr. Cringely’s contact with Google, as there is no attribution for his comments. However, one needn't look very far to find clear contradictions to Mr. Cringely's assertions. Both Google and the X PRIZE Foundation have posted videos of Google Vice President Megan Smith and Co-founder and President Sergey Brin vocally supporting the way in which the X PRIZE Foundation has conducted this competition. Google also took part in the recent Team Summit Rules Workshop to discuss these exact issues--a workshop which Mr. Cringely elected not to attend.

In any case, I do wish Mr. Cringely well on his planned lunar mission, and look forward to seeing him on the Moon.

(Note: An earlier version of this story had Mr. Cringely's name misspelled in a few places. Apologies for that typo--and thanks to the readers who pointed that out!

Last week, we announced the dates and the opening of registration for the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The timing of this announcement is bit late when compared to 2007 -- when registration opened in mid-February and closed at the end of April--but is a bit ahead of schedule compared to the 2006 event. I'm hoping that with two year's worth of momentum behind the event, we'll see more teams and better results that ever before.

I've been emailing with most of the 2008 teams lately, and I know that they are really fired up. It's wonderful to see so many of them getting their vehicles into the air (even if not all of those flights go as planned). Despite John Carmack's understandable grievances about the Challenge being a once-a-year event, I think that that strategy has actually massively benefited NASA, the New Space Industry, and probably even Armadillo itself. I don't have perfect insight into Armadillo's plan, but I like to think that the failure to win the Level One purse probably helped push Armadillo more quickly and more forcefully towards making changes like their shift to a film-cool engine chamber--which, they note in their most recent blog, "was absolutely the right thing to do. We are improved on every metric from the cooled graphite engines of last year."

Registrations for this year's event are already starting to come in, and it's been really rewarding for me to see how each team has taken the opportunity of another year's worth of competition to really improve themselves at all levels: they are better prepared technically, financially, and legally than they were at this point last year. I'm glad also that a lot of that progress has come as the teams help each others--for example, see Masten's blog post about getting help from and even hiring some of their competitors. I've certainly touched on this issue before, but it still makes me happy!

Anyway, with the Lunar Lander Challenge up and running again, I hope to be able to discuss it much more on this blog--but I promise not to neglect the Google Lunar X PRIZE. In fact, I hope that circumstance will evolve to the point where those two competitions converge and we start seeing more overlaps between them

It looks like it’s the time for new X PRIZE people to introduce themselves! I’ve been around for the past couple of months already, and we’ve been quite busy here preparing the Google Lunar X PRIZE Team Summit that took place in Strasbourg two weeks ago.

So, let me tell you a little bit more on how I got involved in the Google Lunar X PRIZE! Since I was a student at Supaero, French Graduate School of Aerospace Engineering, I have been following the X PRIZE Foundation's achievements with excitement. After the success of the Ansari X PRIZE, I even teamed-up with a group of people working to start a French space tourism promotion and development association!

When the Google Lunar X PRIZE was announced in September 2007, I was working at the European Space Agency (ESA) on a future soft precision lunar landing mission (Moon NEXT) as part of the Aurora Program. When I read about this new prize, I immediately knew I wanted to be part of this incredible adventure! I had the unique chance to leverage the experience I earned working at ESA to bring my own contribution to the first ever private lunar mission. And I figured out that working at the X PRIZE Foundation would be a lot of fun!

And indeed it is! Working for the X PRIZE Foundation is the chance to do a lot of great things: I will probably talk a little bit more about those in some following blog entries, but to give you the highlights, within just a few months of work, I have had a chance to travel back to Europe for the Team Summit and to meet the teams, to meet inspiring people like Anousheh Ansari and several NASA Astronauts (not to mention the X PRIZE people that are absolutely amazing!), to see a Space Shuttle Launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and above all to work with a great team of dedicated and passionate people in DC…So yes, definitely, working at the X PRIZE Foundation is a blast!!

Space Shuttle Launch from Banana Creek…Go Discovery!

Being the only European on the Google Lunar X PRIZE staff, I found myself responsible for organizing the student competition that took place during the Team Summit. With enthusiastic teams of masters-level students from most of the best aerospace universities in Europe (namely from France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), as well as one from the USA (Florida), and ISU of course, the competitions was a great success! The students worked during the entire day and finally gave their presentations to an amazing panel of judges, featuring Peter Diamandis (X PRIZE Foundation), Pete Worden (NASA), Michael Simpson (ISU), Bernard Foing (ESA), and Tiffany Montague (Google).
Congratulations to the teams from ISU and Stuttgart for winning the competition – and then a VIP access both to the next X PRIZE Cup and Shuttle Launch – and to Supaero for winning the technical prize! You can browse their presentations online, as well as pictures, videos, twitter live posts, team blogs, … on the student competition page.

One of the students of the ISU the student team is now working as an intern at Odyssey Moon, the first officially announced Google Lunar X PRIZE Team! You can read his first impressions on what it’s like to work for Odyssey Moon and on the student competition on his blog post.

I will try to post inside views on what’s going on with the Google Lunar X PRIZE and some other space-related prizes such as the Lunar Lander Challenge, but also discussing a little bit about the cultural differences that strike me while working in the United States, from a French perspective.

And also, I will sometime post in French too! Mainly to connect more directly with fellow French space enthusiasts - but it is also a good opportunity for those of you who took French class some time ago to practice it! Space exploration is more and more an international adventure, and so should it be!

Alors pour finir, un petit mot en français pour encourager d’autres équipes européennes ou françaises à rejoindre la compétition et à remporter la nouvelle course vers la Lune !!

- Pierre-Damien

- Mike