Armadillo Aerospace team takes the lead in Lunar Lander Challenge

Armadillo Aerospace, with its Scorpius rocket, has taken the lead to win Level 2 of the Lunar Lander Centennial Challenge and one million dollars of NASA’s money. Last year, Armadillo won Level 1 by launching a rocket to more than a 160 feet in the air, hovering for a minute and a half, landing on a nearby launch pad, then taking off again and repeating the feat to land again on the original launch pad. Armadillo won $350,000 for that feat.

This year, the competition was more challenging. This time the Armadillo team was obliged to launch their rocket, hover for at least three minutes, land on a pad strewn with simulated lunar boulders, refuel, then fly again to the original launch pad. This Armadillo was able to do during a break in the weather at the Texas site where the Lunar Lander competition, sponsored by Northrup Grumman and the X-Prize foundation, was held this year. The Scorpius managed to land within a meter of the intended targets each time.

In a month and a half, teams from Masten Space Systems and Unreasonable Rocket will make their own attempts to better Armadillo’s feat. The winner will take home the million dollar prize provided by NASA.

The Centennial Challenges is part of an innovative NASA program to provide cash prizes for developments of space useful technology or demonstrations of the same, such as the Lunar Lander Challenge. Already a space glove competition has been won with the development of a flexible space glove that will be useful for space walking astronauts obliged to perform repair missions. A space elevator demonstration competition has been held the past two or so years.

Supporters of these kinds of competitions point out that the relatively small prizes have inspired tens of thousands of man hours of technology development. Nevertheless, Congress has so far been reluctant to increase funding for the Centennial Challenges.

The Centennial Challenge program was inspired by the highly successful Ansari X-Prize that was rewarded to a team from the Scaled Composites company that was the first to launch a manned space craft in a sub orbital flight twice within a few weeks. Other technology prize competitions have been inspired, including a lunar prize sponsored by Google to be awarded to the first private company to land an instrument package on the Moon.