H.R. 4916 Aeronautics and Space Prize Act

NASA Watch has a post on the Aeronautics and Space Prize Act sponsored by Representative Dana Rohrabacher. The details are here. With my limited legal reading ability, it looks like it's a bill to establish a national endowment for space prizes that's funded by NASA-related advertising, as well as by private gifts. I didn't notice anything about any "regular" Congressional funding of NASA or other government space prizes.

Mprize Fundraising YouTube Challenge

The Methuselah Foundation continues its fundraising efforts with more matching and a YouTube Challenge. Here's the original YouTube challenge.

BonNova Novel

EarthTimes.org has a press release about a 1996 novel with a connection to Lunar Lander Challenger BonNova being introduced in audio versions. It's called Flight, it's by Vanna Bonta, and it has a fictional spacecraft called The Lauryad. As the BonNova site says:

Announcement October 30, 2007 It was an honor to participate in the Northrup Grumman X-Prize Cup Lunar Lander Challenge. BonNova would like to thank its investors and supporters. Chief Engineer Allen Newcomb welcomes two new engineers on board, Dan Kent and Bob Noteboom, and would like to thank Vanna Bonta for her contributions, without whose inspiration this project would have never taken flight.

Google Earth Treasure Map

The Google Earth Blog notices something interesting when reviewing their flight path to the X PRIZE Cup.

Space Elevator Games, Past and Future

The Space Elevator Blog has a post with a number of videos, including two from past Space Elevator Games. It also has another post with a number of videos, also from the Space Miners. All told, it's quite a lot of video records.

Meanwhile, both the Space Elevator Reference and the Space Elevator Blog present the latest newsletter from the Spaceward Foundation. There's a positive look back on the 2007 games, which I think is warrented (unless perhaps you're one of the teams that wanted to win that money in 2007). There's also a look ahead to the 2008 games, which, as I've noted in other posts, are tremendously ambitious. Of course, it's for a tremendous amount of money ...

I've noted some of the changes before ... for the Beam Power Challenge, they include a total of $2M in prizes at stake, and a 1 km climb, presumably requiring laser power. Here's an excerpt to show how they're thinking:

The racetrack we’re planning, based on a pyramid-tethered balloon, will be the tallest such pyramid ever flown. We’re working with industry experts to set this up, and will keep you updated. This is very exciting for us, since this architecture is extendable to 10 km as well

The update notes that some teams are already planning to go for it in 2008, and registration is open. I'm not sure which teams will be in the running, but The Kansas City Space Pirates are going for the win in 2008, and are switching to laser power. However, they need to do some fundraising for laser testing. Meanwhile, the McGill Space Elevator Team notes that

The team is working hard to create a laser beaming system for the 2008 competition.

Centennial Challenges at Space Politics

While I was on a posting hiatus, Space Politics posted on the NASA budget in part of an series of budget posts. The one I linked includes the following paragraph about Centennial Challenges:

The conference report notes that no money is being provided to NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program in FY08 to fund additional prizes. “Providing additional funds to a program based on prizes only creates a sizeable amount of unused funds while other aspects of NASA’s mission are being cut or delayed due to a lack of funds,” the report notes. That language is immediately followed by nearly seven pages of earmarks totaling several tens of millions of dollars (which will be dissected in a later post.)

Rocket Videos

High Power Rocketry recently posted some videos from Armadillo Aerospace. I supposed they must be old, but anyway it's a good excuse to link to a site with a lot of cool rocket videos, from the smallest rockets to the biggest.

Reenacting Glenn's Flight?

Personal Spaceflight has a post on an idea to redo John Glenn's original spaceflight in modern times. One of the commenters has an idea for a different way to remember that flight:

A far better honor would be to use the money as a prize for placing a private astronaut in orbit. $45 million would get folks interesed. Call it the Glenn Prize in honor of the flight.

I wonder what John Glenn himself thinks about the idea?

Wearable Power Prize "Power Wear Off" Date

Cosmic Log notes that the Department of Defense has set a date and location for the Wearable Power Prize event:

The Department of Defense announced today the inaugural $1.75 million Wearable Power Prize competition will be held at the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), Twentynine Palms, Calif., Sept.22 until Oct. 4, 2008.

The Wearable Power Prize Competition was first announced in Jul. 2007. Its 13-day capstone event culminates on Oct 4 at MCAGCC with a “Power Wear Off” competition. The Wearable Power Prize competition gathers and tests wearable power-generating methods and techniques. The goal is to reduce the weight of power systems that warfighters carry to operate their radios, navigation, weapons, and other gear. Competitors will demonstrate wearable systems that can power military equipment for 96 hours, but that weigh less than half the current battery load.

There's more from Network World.

Automotive X PRIZE Articles, Past and Present

I already posted on the article here a couple weeks ago, but I didn't know it was the WIRED Science cover story. Now the article is featured in an X PRIZE Foundation news update, and is also featured front and center on the Foundation's main page.

Meanwhile, the X PRIZE Cars site has had so many updates in the couple weeks since I first mentioned it that I won't even give links to the individual posts. Just go to the main page and start reading. Also, be careful to not just read the initial page; a lot of the content is reached when you "Continue reading". For Elon Musk fans, there are a number of references and links to Tesla Motors. There's also an offer to ask the AXP Foundation people or competitor teams questions at the Detroit Auto Show.

Meanwhile, the X PRIZE Foundation news scroller gives a link to an article from the Great Lakes IT Report on the AXP competition and its planned appearance at the Auto Show. There's also a link to an article in the Canyon News on the upcoming official launch of the AXP competition.

Far-Ranging Pomerantz Post

William Pomerantz at the X PRIZE Foundation has a new blog post that covers a lot of ground.

I've posted on some of the information before, such as the potential Lunar X PRIZE Team FREDNET, Google Lunar X PRIZE betting, and the Foundation's Google Lunar X PRIZE forum Will mentioned in an earlier post. However, there sure is a lot in the post you haven't seen here, including a link to the recently updated Official Questions and Answers, so check it out.

Will isn't the only one posting at the X PRIZE Foundation; Tom Vander Ark has recent posts here, here, and here. Some of his earlier posts give a lot of hints about where the Foundation is going, but I'm not sure if I picked up the hints this time (maybe because I haven't read the books and articles he mentioned).

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Lunar Rover

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT blog considers what it would take to make the robot system work on the Moon to win the Google Lunar X PRIZE. As some commenters mention, there are probably some good possibilities for related contests here on Earth for kids.

Stardance

At last summer's Heinlein Centennial, in addition to speaking on panels, singing, and more, Jeanne and Spider Robinson presented the Stardance Project, a real zero gravity dance project based on a science fiction novella and trilogy. At the presentation, they described the project and the funding difficulties they had, and Peter Diamandis volunteered Zero-G flights for them to get the project moving.

Now, they have a blog that shows their progress with the zero gravity dance, now in the "familiarization" stage. This particular post from Spider draws parallels to Ansari X PRIZE sponsor Anousheh Ansari and her blog from the ISS, and this blog from the ground as a new form of space-related art is made. The Heinlein Award, Heinlein Centennial, and Diamandis's early work with the X PRIZE are all discussed.

Here's another key post with a graceful teaser video of the dance as they find out what the environment is really like. Science fiction author Allen Steele is one of the commenters to the post.

The blog is fairly new, so you can probably read all of the posts in time sequence.

See more about the Stardance project here and here.

Centennial Challenging 2007 NYT Year in Questions

Wow, I find myself way behind in posting.

Check out the 2007 The Year in Questions from the New York Times. Question number 33 is related to the NASA Centennial Challenges. In case that's not enough of a hint, here's the answer key.

Out For a Few Days

I won't be posting for a few days, but you should be able to find plenty of updates on the space blogs and news sites on the right ...