Anyone else find TC's stock image annoying for this story? I guess it fits the tone, but it twisted my imagination a good deal, even after I'd read the original story. A real photo would have been valuable, but a generic one is distracting.
I don't mean to argue with that. I'm all for the prize; I think both Google and these competing companies are doing great things for our space technology.
What I really want is for these companies to get inspired and make it to the moon. Claim that prize. And once they've done that, I'll be more interested in hearing about their commercialization and their "Moon Idol" idea.
That's true, they're still planning to use the Falcon 9. I'm all for Google's prize and I think CMU is doing a great job. What bothers me is that significant incentives exist; SpaceX bids for plenty of contracts to deliver payloads to orbit or the space station. (http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php)
Yes, there's plenty of room to expand into space tourism, space reality TV shows, and make money from that. But take the last paragraph of this article - "People become part of moon exploration" - why so rushed? Let's get a commercial crew to space in one piece first, and talk about bringing the people in later.
Really I agree - I just think the entrepreneurial ideas have gotten away with themselves too early in the game.
"At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed Moonward within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy." Really the one sentence that stuck out for me, before what I thought were a disappointing list of overly optimistic ideas. While it's good to hear teams getting inspired by Google's challenge, there's plenty of money to be made by carrying payloads to orbit or further for various governments. Why do we need to dream up these grand entrepreneurial ideas before it's clear these companies can even make it into space?
Maybe I'm just disappointed after reading the title because companies I see as more invested and practical - SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, or Blue Origin, for example - weren't mentioned.
I've never found a more honest company. For example, they recently discovered a billing error that amounted to $56 over 5 years .. so they refunded everyone double, donated what they couldn't refund to charity, and apologized profusely. (http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing-...)
I just picked up node recently and found this genuinely useful - for me at least, it doesn't matter if it's ranked in exactly accurate order or not.
In fact, I really wish I knew of more lists like this. Every time I start learning a new programming language, there's a period where I go shopping for useful sites and tutorials, usually resulting in a lot of wasted time with bad tutorials and unhelpful sites. If I knew of a one-stop ranking system like this, I would make use of it.