Last September when Google announced it would provide a $30 million prize for the first teams to land a rover on the Moon and send pictures back to Earth, Mitchell London saw an opening.
Two months later, Astrobotic Technology was born in Redmond, Wash. The young company sent in its $1,000 registration fee immediately, and has become the second group to announce that it’s going after the prize. Odyssey Moon was the first earlier this month.
Astrobotic has set an ambitious schedule. It wants to land in the Sea of Tranquility in time to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. So it will have to be ready to go in July 2009. It is collaborating with Raytheon to make the trip possible.
London describes himself as a robotics groupie more than a space groupie. He helped found the CMU Robotics Club at Carnegie Mellon University when he was studying electrical engineering there in the early 1980s.
His CMU days live on with him. He recruited his former professor, William L. “Red” Whittaker, CMU’s Fredkin Professor of Robotics and founder of the National Robotics Engineering Consortium, as chairman and chief technology officer for Astrobotic Technology. Whittaker will lead the company’s X Prize quest.
His university days included learning coding to make his robotics work. While he longed for a job at JPL to work on space robotics, it was a young company called Microsoft that offered him a paycheck. London moved to Redmond and counts writing the printer driver code for Windows 2.0 and working with the company’s research team led by Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s future CTO, as highlights of his career there.
London’s vision for the Google prize involves far more than robotics. He wants to film the descent onto the plain where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took man’s first steps on the Moon. Hopefully, they’ll come down close enough to spot the famous flag that Armstrong and Aldrin planted, although he suspects that the nylon flag will have disintegrated and only its staff will remain. Either way, it will be a memorable image.
While Astrobotic has sent in its registration fee, it hasn’t completed the application process. It is still working out a media rights agreement with the X Prize Foundation.
“We believe the media rights have more value than the prize,” he says. One idea is to show the descent and rover activities in 3D in large-screen theaters. Astrobotic’s rover will carry stereo cameras to make that possible.
To qualify for the $20 million grand prize from Google, X Prize contestants must roam at least 500 meters from their landing spot. A $5 million bonus prize can be earned by doing more, including roaming at least 5,000 meters from the landing site and imaging human artifacts. That’s where the Apollo flag comes in.
But London isn’t interested in sticking around the local neighborhood. He wants to ascend into the Descartes Highlands where John Young and Charles Duke set down on Apollo 16 in April 1972. That will require a 300-meter traverse but it will give the Astrobotic team a chance to look for the lunar rover that Young and Duke left behind.
Astrobotic Technology is privately held. London says he and other backers have put in several million dollars. They’re planning to raise another $75 million in 1st quarter 2008 from U.S. investors.
Raytheon’s experience developing Digital Scene Matching Area Correlations (DSMAC) ballistic trajectory controls attracted Astrobotic’s attention, and the two are collaborating on the Google effort. London says DSMAC should allow it to set down its rover with far more precision than anything the Apollo teams had at hand. That’s what gives him confidence that he can land close enough to image the Apollo 11 site during descent.
Raytheon has already undertaken initial design and planning activities. The baseline rover has a mass of 75 kilograms but, of course, is little more than a concept at this stage. (Of course, Raytheon has a bit of lunar experience: It worked on the Saturn launch vehicle, lunar modules and the astronauts’ space suits).
Long term, London sees oxygen extraction from the lunar regolith as a business opportunity for fueling lunar activities. For a man in a hurry – the Apollo anniversary is only 19 months away – London isn’t shy about some other ambitious dates. His company’s objective is to have a pilot plant in operation in 2013 and full-scale production underway in 2015.
