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National Geographic : 2017 Aug
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36 national geographic • august 2017 The members of the young crew explained their plans to blast the device into space aboard a rocket late this year, position it into lunar or- bit nearly a quarter million miles away, guide it to a landing on the moon, and send it roaming across the harsh lunar landscape. The engineers of TeamIndus said their company would do all of this on a shoestring budget, probably $65 million, give or take, the vast majority of it raised from private investors. A prominent Mumbai investor, Ashish Kacho- lia, who has put more than a million dollars into the firm, sat at the back of the room, transfixed by the discussion. It somehow combined the intense, rapid-fire questions of a doctoral the- sis defense with the freewheeling, everybody’s- shouting, laughter-punctuated atmosphere of the Lok Sabha, India’s boisterous lower house of parliament. Kacholia hardly needed to be here all day to check up on this particular investment of his—far from his largest—but he stayed just to hear the erudite dialogue on selenocentric (moon-centered) orbit projections, force model- ing, apogee and perigee, and the basis for how “the kids” drew up the error covariance matrix. “It’s thrilling, really,” Kacholia explained. “You’ve got these 25-, 28-year-olds up there de- fending their calculations, all their work, in front of a thousand years of the nation’s collective aerospace experience and wisdom.” His friend S. K. Jain, also a well-known Indian investor, nodded in vigorous agreement. “ These kids are firing up the whole imagination of India,” he commented. “ They’re saying to everyone, Noth- ing is impossible. ” Nearly 50 years after the culmination of the first major race to the moon, in which the Unit- ed States and the Soviet Union spent fantastic amounts of public money in a bid to land the first humans on the lunar surface, an intriguing new race to our nearest neighbor in space is unfold- ing—this one largely involving private capital and dramatically lower costs. The most immedi- ate reward, the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize (or GLXP) will be awarded to one of five finalist teams from around the world. They’re the first ever privately funded teams to attempt landing a traveling vehicle on the moon that can transmit high-quality imagery back to Earth. The competition is modeled explicitly after the great innovation-spurring prize races of the early years of aviation, most notably the Orteig Prize, which Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 when he flew the Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New York to Paris. Like the quest for the Orteig Prize, the com- petition for the Lunar XPrize involves national prestige. Teams from Israel, Japan, and the U.S., plus one multinational group, are vying for the honor along with India; a cavalcade of other na- tions participated on the 16 teams that survived into the semifinal stage last year. Almost as diverse as their countries of origin is the range of approaches and commercial part- nerships involved in solving the three basic prob- lems at hand—launching from Earth, landing on the moon, and then going mobile to gather and transmit data. To meet the last challenge, three teams plan to deploy variants of a traditional rov- er, while the other two intend to use their landing craft to make one giant leap for private enter- prise: They will “hop” the required minimum of 500 meters on the moon rather than drive across the lunar surface. As with many early aviation prizes, whichever team prevails almost surely will spend much more to win the prize than it gets back in prize money, though all the teams hope the global publicity and “brand enhancement” of victory will eventu- ally make their investment pay off handsomely. at its core, this new sprint to space poses a question that would have been laughable in the Cold War era of the 1960s, when the U.S. was will- ing to spend more than 4 percent of its federal budget to beat its superpower foe to the moon: Can someone actually make money venturing out into the great beyond? To a demonstrably wide range of entrepreneurs, scientists, vision- aries, evangelists, dreamers, eccentrics, and pos- sible crackpots involved in the burgeoning space industry, the answer is an enthusiastic yes. President John F. Kennedy famously urged America in 1962 to “choose to go to the moon
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