NASA Centennial Challenges

SFF Proposals 2009




Lunar Lander Competition II

A follow-on to the recent highly successful Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander
Competition, which was based on an idea originally suggested by Foundationers at the
NASA Centennial Challenges Workshop back in 2004. The new Lunar Lander
Competition would be closer in scale to the original concept submitted in 2004.

The format of this competition would be similar to the Ansari X-Prize. To win the prize, a
team would need to demonstrate a reusable VTVL vehicle, carrying one pilot and an
additional crew member (or ballast), achieving a suborbital trajectory reaching space
with a delta-vee representative of that required by a lunar lander.

The goal of the LLC II is to encourage the development of viable VTVL landers by
multiple companies. For this reason, and because VTVL suborbital vehicles are
arguably harder than the original X-Prize goal, a larger purse is recommended ($20-30
million). Second- and third-place prizes are also recommended.

Low-Cost Spacesuit Prize

This concept was also submitted by a Foundationer at the first Centennial Challenges
Workshop. It was selected by NASA and later included in a White House NASA budget
request but not yet funded.

This prize would encourage the development of low-cost spacesuits, which are vital to
the safety of the emerging suborbital spaceflight industry, and produce a new
generation of experienced spacesuit suppliers that NASA can turn to for the
development of more advanced exploration suits. An annual prize of $500,000 is
recommended. To avoid the problem of auditing books to determine the cost of a
spacesuit, the competition would instead measure the number of personnel-hours
needed to assembly a suit from standard, commercially available parts and materials.
(This is a realistic proxy because labor is the largest component in spacesuit costs.) The
first Low-Cost Spacesuit Prize would be awarded to the first team to build a working suit
in a time that meets a minimum qualifying mark set by the judges. After that, the prize
would be awarded annually to the team that beats the previous year's score and the
current year's competitors.

http://spacefrontier.org/ 1
"Ops Normal" -- The Suborbital Operability Competition

This competition follows directly in the footsteps of the Ansari X-Prize. In an annual
event lasting for at least 10 years, companies would compete in a NASA-sponsored
competition to demonstrate highly reliable, high-tempo suborbital spaceflight operations.
A $5 million annual prize would be awarded to the company that flies the largest
number of suborbital flights within a period of one week. A possible alternative prize
would be a one-year contract guaranteeing the government purchase of a large number
of flights for scientific or educational purposes.

Suborbital Point-to-Point Competition

Also similar in format to the Ansari X-Prize, this competition is designed to stimulate the
development of suborbital vehicles for point-to-point delivery of packages or
passengers. To minimize the leap from current vehicles, the initial competition would
occur over a short distance -- between the two spaceports in Mojave, California and Las
Cruces, New Mexico. A prize of $15-20 million would be awarded to the first vehicle to
demonstrate two successful round trips between the spaceports in less than a week,
carrying a pilot and 500 kg payload on each trip.

The "Explore Space!" Competition

This competition would stimulate the interest of students in science, technology,
engineering, and math subjects in general, and space science and technology in
particular. NASA would hold an annual "science fair"-type competition for high-school
teams across the country, which would propose and prototype experiments to be
performed on commercial suborbital spaceflights. During the Explore Space! science
fair, each team would test its prototype hardware on a microgravity aircraft flight funded
by NASA. A panel of NASA judges would select the winning teams each year, with each
winner receiving a guaranteed, NASA-funded flight on a commercial suborbital vehicle,
$20 thousand dollars for further experiment development, and NASA in-kind support for
fabrication of the final flight experiment.

The Jerrie Cobb Lunar Exploration Prize

The largest prize recommendation, this represents a stretch goal for NASA's Centennial
Challenges program. Named for one of the "Mercury 10," the First Lady Astronaut
Trainees who were tested by NASA but not allowed to train or fly because of their
gender. This competition would offer a $1 billion prize for the first private US group to
achieve the goal of "landing a woman on the Moon and returning her safely to the
Earth."

2 http://spacefrontier.org/