Stanley, did you get a 21 ton weight dropped on you by that damn coyote while you were trekking across the desert? No, I guess not. That's just a Passat instead of a Toureg because the Stanford team doesn't need much ground clearance for this Challenge. Its more Urban in nature. Something about naming your entrants to give them a little anthropomorphic sympathy and then calling the next machine by the same name strikes me as a little off. I mean, they couldn't have just build another robot, called him johnny 5 and treated him like a family member.
But that's not all the news. NASA seems to like the DARPA / xPrize system of outsourcing development to whoever wants the prize money; which I am henceforth dubbing "Prize-tracting." They've got a few bounties out there for gadgets that will send us back to the moon under budget and looking our best.
Take for example the glove design that took home 200 Gees.
Or the competition for a lunar soil digger that no one won on Monday. (keep in mind that no one won the grand challenge the first year either)
And then there's the lunar lander contest that is quickly approaching and has teams battling guidance chips and gravity for 180 seconds.
It is an interesting business model, I have to say. Enticing all the garage geniuses out with semi-substantial rewards. But I'm not really sure the Prize-tract money NASA has put up so far will draw in anything more than folks with interesting ideas and maybe a small company or two. DARPA had the insight to have educational organizations do their dirty work for them, you know, places that like money but are in it for the prestige as well. I can only hope that NASA has a few more ducketts to throw in the ring, or our next mission to the moon, while absolutely a feat of engineering and completely safe, will be in a lawn chair with a garden hose taped to the back.
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