Sff Prizes Proposals

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.

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"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."

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