Man builds a lunar lander in his garage
By Brett Duesing
Paul Breed is an unreasonable man.
His video post on YouTube, one of many online artifacts that detail his progress so far, is titled “Why Neighbors Think I’m Crazy.” For the camera, Breed (click here to read about Paul's progress on his blog) demonstrates the injector flow rate for his lunar lander, which he is building in his garage.
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With the help of his 21-year-old son (also a Paul Breed), Breed has been laboring on the spacecraft for a little over a year. The undertaking may seem less insane when it is explained that the vehicle’s ultimate destination is not the moon, but the New Mexico desert, where like-minded rocket fanatics come to compete for the next million-dollar Xprize.
The Lunar Lander Challenge, sponsored by the Xprize Foundation, NASA, and Northrop Grumman, dares individual inventors to build what took massive governmental resources 40 years ago — a payload-carrying rocket vehicle that can take off, hover and land multiple times.
With the new technological tools now available, building a rocket ship in one’s garage is not so much a flight of fantasy anymore. Thanks to 3-D CAD, in-house CNC capabilities, and a borderline-irrational degree of determination, the father-and-son duo known as Unreasonable Rocket have invented a working lander in only a year’s worth of part-time effort. The Breeds have performed virtually all of the work in their home shop, keeping stride with eight-man teams who have been in the contest twice as long.
“It’s still a problem that is insanely hard,” admits Breed. “It is in many ways an engineering tour d’force. You’ve got electronics and plumbing to think about, as well as structural, chemical, aerodynamics, and safety problems to consider.”
Rocketry still remains an inexact and experimental science. The basic techniques have not changed much since the 1950s. But inventing — the method of design and prototyping — has changed dramatically just in the last few years. Recent commercial developments may usher in a new era where creative and highly motivated people can achieve technical breakthroughs of which governments, and corporations, can only dream.
Rising To The Challenge
 The design utilizes four rocket engines at the same time for both propulsion and stability. (Click image for a larger view) |
The mission of the Xprize Foundation aims to stimulate the private sector and the powerful force of personal ingenuity to solve big problems. Worldwide press surrounded the first Xprize award, the Ansari Challenge, where Brian Binnie flew a reusable craft to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and back.
Putting up a purse for a crazy stunt for the benefit humankind is not a new trick. The Xprize contests (now expanded beyond the space arenas to the fields of genomics and automobiles) took inspiration from the old Orteig Prize, which offered $25,000 to anyone who could manage a solo cross-Atlantic flight, a task achieved by an unknown pilot named Charles Lindbergh in 1938. Innovations made by one unreasonable man spawned a new aviation industry and reinvented the notion of travel.
The Lunar Lander Challenge is the second space-related technical feat. A vehicle must lift its payload and land on a pad 100 meters away, while hovering for a total of either 90 seconds (for the smaller award), or 180 seconds (to win the grand prize). Moreover, landers must make the same trip back within a couple of hours. The desert competition is held annually each October until all the $2 million prize money has been claimed.
The Quadrant Design
All of the eight other landers exhibited at the 2007 event utilize a single rocket engine, typically surrounded by actuators and thrusters to steer and stabilize the craft. Unreasonable Rocket’s scheme is unique in that it uses a series of smaller rocket motors which do double-duty in terms of propulsion and maneuvering. The modular scheme also allows the team to build two ships to compete in both the 90-second and 180-second events.
“If you look at our design, the vehicle is quadrantly symmetrical. My thinking was, if you can build one quadrant and get it working, you just duplicate it three times and then you’re done,” Breed explains. “That way you don’t have to redesign values and actuators and thrusters.”
This shortcut to development looked simple on the drawing board, but in practice, the four-motor design has proved troublesome.
“We got a 128-second duration run the first time, which for a rocket motor is incredible,” says Breed. “For our quadrant design, we built four more of them, but they wouldn’t run at all. We had no idea what was wrong, since we made them as identical to ten decimal places.”
Chemical processes inside the motor can be so temperamental that even changing the solder from copper to silver – as the Breeds eventually discovered – causes an ignition failure. Even in the most reliable rockets, successful launch seems dependent to some extent on luck, which is why Breed considers rocket science to be less of a science and more of a black art. The quadrant design must get lucky four times. In addition, the smaller engines burn hotter, requiring Breed to devise a more advanced cooling system.
“Those are the sort of things you learn the hard way, which weren’t obvious in the beginning,” says Breed. He accepts the unforeseen setbacks with good humor, as par for the course in rocket science. “NASA’s first attempt success rate in their approach to Mars was down in the 50-percent range, and they spent billions of dollars doing analysis.
“If I had to start all over again, I probably would go with a single engine, knowing what I know now,” he jokes, “but I’m already six-months pregnant.”
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