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Mojave company qualifies for million-dollar Lunar Lander X-Prize
With only four minutes to go, the scrappy little rocket team of Masten Space Systems fought through a series of problems and disappointments to qualify Friday morning for the $1 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X-Prize. Mechanical and electrical glitches had dogged the company’s efforts to qualify Wednesday and Thursday even though the rocket had flown flawlessly on Tuesday.
Thursday’s attempt ended with the company’s rocket in flames, but assisted by volunteers, some of whom work for competing rocket companies, the Masten team repaired and modified their rocket.
It went on to make two successful flights with sufficient accuracy to put the team in first place for the Lunar Lander competition.
Greg Jones of Mojave, and Brian Bernard, of Los Angeles, are both with Orbital Expeditions and worked all night with the Masten crew. So did Keith Stormo, a molecular biologist from Moscow, Idaho, who started the High Expectations rocket team with his adult son. “I took a week vacation to come watch the rocket launches, but it turned out to be a working vacation,” he said with a weary smile. “I wanted to see someone fly, even if it couldn’t be us, so it was good to be a part of the Masten team in this effort.”
By Friday morning, an exhausted team rolled Xoie out to the test site. The rocket made its first flight with an unofficial accuracy of 28 cm, and returned with a ten cm meter accuracy. The average was 19 cm or 7 and a half inches.
After the two flights were finished, company founder Dave Masten said,
“this shows the high caliber of people in the rocket community. People from High Expectations, Speedup, , XCOR, Orbital Expeditions and others volunteered and pitched in on the all-night effort to repair Xoie, and prepare her for flight.”
