We won’t know the final results of the 2007 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge until the end of this year’s X PRIZE Cup, coming up in just two weeks—so it’s too early to say which teams will win which prizes. But we can definitely start to look at some of the results of the last 12 months of effort. We can ask some of the very important questions that will allow us to analyze this prize program as a whole, questions like: What did NASA put into this? What did they get out of it? And what is that worth?

I’ll tackle them in order here.

What has NASA put into the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge?

At this point, not too much! And I mean that in a good way.

NASA, of course, is contributing $2,000,000 in prize money to the program. But none of that money has been paid out yet—so though it is on the balance sheet somewhere, it’s money that has not yet been spent and only potentially might some day be spent.

NASA pays nothing to the X PRIZE Foundation for administering this prize. All of the expenses associated with producing the
rules, registering teams, coordinating the event, assuring safety, promoting the competition, and providing educational programs relevant to the prize came at zero expense to NASA.

Indeed, the only real expenses to NASA were some staff time and a small amount of travel and supplies (the big foam-core checks, et cetera). In terms of staff time, it’s fairly astounding to realize that NASA’s prize program, Centennial Challenges—one of NASA’s most exciting and interesting programs in years—is for the most part run by one person. And it’s not only his full-time project. So, if you consider the cost of this one employee, working on all of the different Centennial Challenges programs, plus all of the travel, supplies, et cetera, a very generous estimate for the total amount NASA has spent on the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge to date is probably $100,000.

So, even if all $2 million is given away later this month, NASA will have spent maybe $2.1 million running this program. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s something like one percent of one percent of NASA’s budget.

What has NASA gotten out of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge?

There are a couple of different, valid ways to look at this question.

One is simply tallying up the amount of research done by all of the teams.

From time to time, the X PRIZE Foundation queries our teams as to exactly what level of resources they’ve put into the efforts. The values that seem to be most relevant are time—the number of person-hours put into it—and money—a rough estimate of dollars either directly spent or donated in the form of equipment or services.

Though we’ll need to collect one more set of numbers from our teams, we can extrapolate out one data point or so and come to some fairly solid final numbers for both of these figures to date.

Since we announced the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge on May 5, 2006, our eight registered teams have poured about 42,000 person-hours and more than $5 million into their entries. Right away, that should strike you as a good bargain for NASA, considering that they are paying in only about $2.1 million (or less) into the program. Generally speaking, the government pays for research and development plus profit margin; here, they aren’t even paying for half of the direct cash outlay of research and development. Looking at it another way, NASA bought 42,000 person-hours in total from eight different companies. If you take some pretty standard assumptions for what the government pays to buy research and development--$250,000 per person-year, which works out to about $120 per person-hour—that nicely works out to figure also right around $5 million. And that's not counting the staff time put in by the X PRIZE Foundation, the Federal Aviation Administration, Holloman Air Force Base, et cetera.

Of course, that’s sort of brute-force numerical analogy
ignores the very important question of the efficiency of those person-hours. In other words, we are still left asking:

What is that worth?

To answer this question, it’s helpful to look at similar historical projects conducted by more standard procurement methods. The best analog for the vehicles in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is the Delta Clipper Experimental program, often called DC-X. The DC-X program was undertaken in the early and mid 1990s by McDonnell Douglas, initially for the
US Department of Defense’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and later (as the DC-XA) for NASA. The McDonnell Douglas team, along with key partners (for example, the aeroshell for the vehicle was built by a little company called Scaled Composites) ran this program in excellent fashion, following a “fly a little, break a little” experimental development plan similar to what several of our teams use. DC-X wasn’t intended to be an orbital vehicle, but instead
was more of a proof-of-concept vehicle for Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing (VTVL, also sometimes written VTOL) rockets, just like the vehicles competing in this Challenge. A great team (lead in part by Bill Gaubatz and Pete Worden, both Judges in this Challenge) built several vehicles that did indeed prove several concepts and set a number of world records.

To put some numbers to the DC-X's performance: construction of the DC-X began in 1991 and the vehicle made its first flight in August of 1993. Not counting the time and money spent by McDonnell Douglas during pre-selection and Phase A contract, these numbers mean that the DC-X was approximately a two year, $60 million (in 1991 dollars—so about $95 million in current dollars)
effort. In the end, it produced a vehicle that flew eight times in two years. The longest duration flight was 136 seconds.

By contrast, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge competitors are asked two fly twice in about two hours, and Level Two
competitors would need to fly for at least 180 seconds per flight. Now, you can’t make exact comparisons based on just those numbers—for example, you’d have to note that the DC-X weighed almost 36,000 pounds with a thrust of 50,000 pound-feet pounds of force at lift-off, compared to, say, Pixel , which weighs 2,800 pounds and has 3,400 pounds of thrust at lift-off). But the two classes of vehicle are
similar enough that it’s a pretty useful data point for some rough back-of-the envelope parametric analysis.

To sum up: the DC-X program cost the US government about $95 million in current dollars and took two years to generate a vehicle that performed eight flights (at a rate of four per year).

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge will cost the US government just over $2 million dollars, and has resulted in eight teams working on nine different vehicle designs. Only a year and a half into the program, several of those vehicles have already flown, including Armadillo’s Pixel, which has already flown more than eight times. By the time the prize is fully won, presumably we’ll have at least three or four vehicles capable of performing reliably repeatable VTVL flights pretty closely analogous to the DC-X.

And remember, in comparing this program to the DC-X, we are comparing it to an excellent program, with highly commendable work being done in a very effective and efficient manner.

So, although we can yet say who will walk home with a prize check at the end of this year’s Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, we can already identify several winners: NASA, the US Government, US tax-payers, and the space industry as a whole.

Edit: Thanks to commenter Ashley Zinyk for catching my oversight on the pounds-of-force issue!