What's the hardest part of the Google Lunar X prize? - and abouta lander to search for water on the Moon.

On Dec 7, 4:20*pm, "
wrote:
On Dec 7, 12:47*am, Robert Clark wrote:



*In this post I wondered what would be the hardest part of winning the
Google lunar X-prize:

Newsgroups: sci.astro, sci.physics, sci.space.policy
From: Robert Clark
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:51:22 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: What's the hardest part of the Google Lunar X prize?http://groups.google.com/group/sci.a...929cb160?hl=en

*Some have argued the hardest part would be just getting the funding
to complete the mission.
*Just saw this mentioned on Habitablezone.com:

A Wet Moon Is Hot Once Again
By Keith Cowing on November 15, 2009 8:01 AM 16 Comments
"Keith's 14 Nov note: Word has it that NASA JSC has a stealth "Project
M" underway whereby it would place a lander on the Moon in 1,000 days
- once approved.
"Meanwhile, word has it that NASA is now looking to match Google's $30
million pledge to the Google Lunar X Prize - and that Google may up
their ante as well. Conversations are being held directly between X
Prize and the 9th floor. IPP is not in the loop. Stay tuned."http://www..nasawatch.com/archives/2009/11/a-wet-moon-is-h.html

*Raising the prize amount to $60 million would go a long way to
developing interest for a team to make the attempt. At this amount you
might have teams also have one or more landers to land specifically in
those locations shown to have high water amounts.

* *Bob Clark

Hi, I was part of a half-hearted attempt at the Google lunar X prize
that fizzled out. Details on:http://sssfmoon.proboards.com/index.cgi?
There were various things that were difficult and ended up blocking
the attempt. These included:
1. Getting together a critical mass of interested people in one place.
2. Convincing potential financiers that winning the money was not the
main object of the exercise.
3. Intellectual disagreements over lander design - everyone seemed to
have their own design.
4. Export limitations on components - this was a major hassle for any
team from a country that does not have access to US and European
hardware. In addition, my country has bans on some of the most
appropriate fuels for the lunar lander because of environmental
concerns.
5. Propulsion.
6. Launch cost.
The main problem with propulsion units was that they had to have a
very high thrust to weight ratio. A proposal from the Russians to use
one of their existing engines had a low ratio, low enough to
jeopardise the integrity of the mission. Similarly, we investigated a
privately owned engine in the US, but again the thrust to weight ratio
would have put the mission in jeopardy.
Launch vehicles that were of an appropriate cost were either very
unreliable, nearly unobtainable, or of very small payload - usually
two of the three.

Public funded R&D simply isn't public. Even our NASA can't figure out
how to affordably and safely get another lander onto our physically
dark moon. Even 99.9% of the LRO mission is need-to-know or
nondisclosure rated.

~ BG