This strikes me as very interesting.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

Wouldn't it be a gas if a group of Forth programmers would write the
software for a lander and win this prize? I can image the look on
Google's collective faces if we did this. It would be funny and
fantastic. Well, why don't we? Ofcourse we also need the hardware
including a launch vehicle! As far as I can see the only real problem
nowadays would infact be the launch vehicle. I tell myself that space
isn't a software problem but a hardware problem.

On Oct 4, 9:45 pm, Jason Damisch yahoo.com> wrote:

You should see what John Carmack has been able to accomplish durring
last year's X-Prize Cup at the Las Cruces airport. LOL He was the
only competitor in the challenge that year, and couldn't win the
prize. Infact he hosed both Pixel and Voxel, his landers. All of
this on the surface of the Earth. He had to run his lander manually,
because his software was on the fritz. John is NOT an embedded
systems programmer, but a game programmer. Sure if Quake or Doom blow
up, you just restart you computer, swear, and start playing again. If
you blow up your lander software while flying above the moon, LOL. If
you are in that lander when this happens, you had better have a good
manual override. If memory serves me, Apollo 11 was also landed
manually.

Jason

Jason Damisch wrote:

No, I'd rather get a sponsor, and then show him up. I never liked his
games anyway, just kill, kill, kill, kill. LOL. I'm brainstorming
this right now.

Jason

Jason Damisch wrote:

Launch vehicle shouldn't be too much of a problem. There are a number of
suitable candidates there. I would guess that the main part of the prize
award will be for the lander and rover parts. Assuming this can all be
robotic (it seems like it from the web-site) then we would need to look at
how light we could make a suitable rover and design a lander that would
cope with touching it down gently.

On Oct 4, 9:45 pm, Jason Damisch yahoo.com> wrote:

I currently work at Google. Frankly, Google's collective faces
couldn't care any less how it's done. Forth would not impress them.

Jason Damisch wrote:

Jason Damisch wrote:

The challenge is not, fundamentally, software. Launch costs will be much
of the budget, and those are driven by mass, so everything will revolve
around mass. But don't tell me "software is massless": it needs hardware
and energy (requiring more hardware).

The vehicle for a lunar round trip must go through a series of
metamorphoses, as the requirements for each mission phase differ wildly.
The most common trick is just to discard pieces as you go, but Apollo
also got good effect from rearranging its three modules, and parking two
of them in lunar orbit.

John Doty wrote:

Considering that the algorithms for Earth to Moon transits are already known
and well understood, the software aspects would seem to be almost a done
deal.

I didn't read into it that this was meant to be a round trip situation. It
sounded like it was meant to be a simple robotic "go look" operation. Did
anyone else read differently?

Paul E. Bennett wrote: