Why was the LunarX prize so unsuccessful?

[DAL59]

The Lunar X prize originally started in 2007, had dozens of teams, and a deadline of 2014.  Now, 6 years later, and 13 years after the competition started, no team has landed on the moon and only a couple are even left.  Should google have done something differently, were teams just unlucky,  or were there common engineering problems they encountered?

[kerbiloid]

2007 ? 
It's prehistorical. It's 6 years before KSP.
People just had no idea what are they going to face before KSP had appeared.

They had no chances.

Now we know much better the interplanetary voodoo.

Edited December 20, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Guest]

It wasn't that. It was Google not realizing the sheer magnitude of what they were asking for. Software types tend to do that, and Google is a software company. The thing, IT is much easier than something like vehicle engineering (or biology, for that matter, to name another thing IT companies underestimate). Software operates in a perfectly understood environment, one that is basically binary and has no error margins on the fundamental level. Try to apply that thinking to anything that needs to operate in real world, full of its inexact values and complex relationships, and you will fail. It's like trying to equate living on a city beach and living in a desert.

To succeed in software, you only need an idea, and enough skill to implement it in a good way. Posting a prize to get a bunch of young, talented people thinking will typically result in a software that does what you wanted. To succeed in any experimental science, you need resources, you need experts and you need to be prepared that reality will prove your great idea unworkable anyway. That's what happened to most X-prize teams. 

[Bill Phil]

I think the main issue was that the goal was too difficult, too extreme. At least at the time.

Even Lindbergh’s famous flight was just the first solo flight across the Atlantic between New York City and Paris. Flights across the Atlantic had been done before so the Orteig Prize wasn’t a big stretch in terms of possibility at the time. But I don’t think the space industry was mature enough at the time for a prize like that.

[magnemoe]

27 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

I think the main issue was that the goal was too difficult, too extreme. At least at the time.

Even Lindbergh’s famous flight was just the first solo flight across the Atlantic between New York City and Paris. Flights across the Atlantic had been done before so the Orteig Prize wasn’t a big stretch in terms of possibility at the time. But I don’t think the space industry was mature enough at the time for a prize like that.

Yes, think this would be better today, launches are cheaper and we have more experience with small probes and satellites. 

[Shpaget]

Even if the $20M prize was awarded in advance to every entrant, regardless of their success, it would still have been a failure. $20M is not nearly enough to do what they wanted to be done and they asked for private funding. Basically, they said: "We want you to do something insanely difficult and expensive and if you somehow succeed, we'll reimburse you for lunch money.".

Most people capable of putting stuff on Moon are too busy doing actual work that pays their bills and don't have time to play impossible games. Some of them found patrons in form of huge multinational companies that foolishly bought into the slick marketing, and funded them for a while, but sooner or later, they all decided that enough was enough and the huge marketing opportunity turned out to be not so great.

Google wanted too much, too quickly and offered no meaningful support along the way.

[Nuke]

On 12/20/2019 at 8:49 AM, kerbiloid said:

2007 ? 
It's prehistorical. It's 6 years before KSP.
People just had no idea what are they going to face before KSP had appeared.

They had no chances.

Now we know much better the interplanetary voodoo.

they had orbiter. like kerbal is the first space flight simulator. it took little green men with questionable design choices to make it fun for the masses rather than the nerds. 

[kerbiloid]

10 hours ago, Nuke said:

they had orbiter. like kerbal is the first space flight simulator.

Orbiter looks more nerdish, but not as friendly as KSP and is even not comparable in sense of design.

KSP allows to get experience of many flights quickly.
It allows to test tens of spaceship designs combining them from ready-to-use parts in different ways.

So, Orbiter is just a mockup of what the KSP is.

[Guest]

Except that rockets are not legos, and KSP does not provide you with the slightest idea what it really takes to build a satellite. It just ignores too much. Orbiter, as a simulation, is far better than KSP. It works best for those who already know a thing or two about orbital mechanics and spaceflight, KSP is better at teaching intuition and introducing kids to spaceflight, but for people who are actually seriously involved with spaceflight (that is, everyone involved in X-prize), Orbiter works just fine. 

[Lisias]

19 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

So Orbiter is just a mockup of what the KSP is.

Uh... Nope. Orbiter is the "real thing" on consumer space simulators, being KSP a LEGO style simplified Orbiter.

The distance from Orbiter to KSP is more or less the one between Boeing Training Simulators to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Two completely different products, with different objectives, for different audiences.

[Jacke]

Going to the Moon is much much harder that even getting into orbit.  And software people only get to start to understand when they do real-time programming of systems and have to work with hardware.  Google hasn't done it that much and only some of their people are even starting to understand how tougher things get.

[Guest]

The point of competitions like this isn’t to provide an achievable objective and then pay someone for completing it. The point is to promote creativity, explore possibilities and to encourage innovation.

Edited December 24, 2019 by Guest