I won the NASA Design Competition for Shackelton Crater Exploration
In September of 2024, NASA put out a pair of competitions called Find Me on the Moon. The first competition was to design a low-technology navigation aid that would not use electricity. There were to be ten prizes for that one, with the highest being $10,000. The second competition was to design a system that could enter Shackelton Crater on the moon's south pole and return samples, which had three prizes and a grand prize of $20,000. I won the grand prize for Shackelton exploration and got an honorable mention prize for the navigation competition. Here are the results. There are a lot of amazing designs from a lot of very clever and talented people. I'm honored to be included with them.
I'll be posting more about this once the competition results are formally published. My design was a group of small modular rovers that could be connected in land trains. It also has points for mounting any stabilization equipment needed to make it down the long, dark slopes into a permanently dark crater. These points can also carry, power, and communicate with tools and instrumentation along the land train. Polar land trains were used successfully in the 1960's to build US military installations in the Arctic.
Ironically, I put a lot more effort into my optical navigation proposal, which didn't even get tenth place. It essentially re-wrote older aircraft navigation methods using VOR, but made a miniature visual system. The forearm-mounted theodolite/map and navigation theory are pretty elegant, even if the passively-lit towers were less so.
Mars Sample Return Analysis (May-August, 2024).
When NASA put out a call for proposals in the spring of 2024 to revise the Mars Sample Return program, I was very interested in seeing if a proposal from a small team could be considered. As it turned out, there were too many roadblocks for any entity that didn't already have a team of government paperwork specialists in place. But I, Dr. Tony Muscatello (NASA- Retired) and Dr. Robert Zubrin did a panel on ideas we had over the summer and presented it at the Mars Society Conference in Seattle that Fall.
Each of us had done proposal designs for Mars Sample Return, so we were familiar with the problem. I did a 93-page design paper on Mars Sample Return in 2008 and won a competition with it, Tony was on the third and last Red Dragon study at NASA, and Robert had done several designs dating back almost three decades. We each worked on new updates to those designs, and Tony and I actually did two concepts (one based on Dragon, the other on Starship). Tony and I combined our PowerPoints and the proposals are Here.
X.com - Grok - I asked, "Who is Kent Nebergall?"
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