Robotic Moon Excavation Teams Compete For NASA Prize

NASA's Regolith Excavation Challenge is scheduled for Aug. 2-3, 2008, on the campus of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. The competition requires teams to build a roving excavator that can autonomously navigate, excavate, and transfer approximately 330 pounds of simulated lunar regolith, or lunar soil, into a collector bin within 30 minutes. The total prize purse is $750,000 with a first prize of $500,000.

NASA is looking for new ideas for excavation techniques that do not require excessively heavy machines or large amounts of power. Excavating lunar regolith will be an important part of any construction projects or processing of natural resources on the moon. The California Space Education and Workforce Institute in Santa Maria, Calif., manages the challenge.

Twenty-five teams have registered for the 2008 event. Most of the teams are from the private sector, including some from the toy and information technology industries. Four of the teams are affiliated with universities.

The prize program, known as Centennial Challenges, began in 2005 in recognition of the centennial of powered flight. In keeping with the spirit of the Wright brothers and other American innovators, the Centennial Challenge prizes are offered to independent inventors who work without government support, including small businesses, student groups and
individuals.

The Regolith Excavation Challenge is one of seven current NASA technology prize competitions. NASA provides the prize money for the competitions, while each is managed by an independent organization. The competitions are targeted at a range of technical challenges that support
NASA's missions in aeronautics and space. The goal is to encourage novel solutions from non-traditional sources. NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program Office in Washington manages the program.

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Innovation: More than Science and Technology

As global economic competition intensifies, more countries are deliberately using public policy to shape national systems that allow firms to access innovations that can give them a leg up, according to a special section on global innovation policy in the fall edition of Issues in Science and Technology.

The section focuses on national innovation systems in Mexico, Belgium, India, Korea, Japan, and the United States, and includes articles by R. Chidambaram, the principal scientific adviser to the government of India, Sungchul Chung, president of Korea's Science and Technology Policy
Institute, and Fientje Moerman, vice-minister-president of Flanders and minister for economy, enterprise, science, innovation, and foreign trade.

Managing a national innovation system is a constant challenge -- and struggle, according to Charles Wessner, deputy director of the National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy.

"What works in one context will not necessarily work in another," Wessner writes. "What works in one decade will not necessarily work in the next. And with the global economic system in flux, every country must be ready to reexamine and revise its policies.

"These articles contain no easy answers," Wessner continues. "They offer something much more useful: candid and perceptive discussion of the successes and failures that are slowly leading all of us to a better understanding of how innovation can be tapped and directed to achieve human goals."

In the United States, substantial changes in the national innovation system will be needed, argues Christopher Hill of George Mason University. In his article, The Post-Scientific Society, Hill writes that although science and technology will continue to play a vital role in innovation,
the critical ingredients for continued U.S. economic success are likely to come from other disciplines.

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NASA Names Winners of Personal Air Vehicle Challenge

NASA has awarded $250,000 to participants of the Personal Air Vehicle competition, one of the seven NASA Centennial Challenges. The competition promotes the use of self-operated, personal aircraft for fast, safe, efficient, affordable, environmentally friendly, and comfortable on-demand transportation as a future solution to America's mobility needs.

Four teams competed for overall best performance and prizes for noise reduction, handling, efficiency, short takeoff, and top speed. The contest took place Aug. 4-12 at Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Sonoma, Calif. At no cost to NASA, the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation, known as the CAFE Foundation, administers the challenge. The foundation is a nonprofit group of flight test engineers in Santa Rosa, Calif.

The award recipients are:

• Vantage Prize, $100,000: Vance Turner of Rescue, Calif., owner of a short-wing Pipistrel piloted by Michael Coates
• Noise Prize, $50,000: Dave and Diane Anders of Visalia, Calif., owners and pilots of a RV-4 aircraft
• Handling Qualities Prize, $25,000: John Rehn of Santa Rosa, Calif., owner of a Cessna 172, piloted by Jeff Stocks
• CAFE Efficiency Prize, $25,000: Vance Turner
• Short Runway Prize, $25,000: Vance Turner
• Top Speed, First Prize, $15,000: Dave and Diane Anders
• Top Speed, Second Prize, $10,000: Vance Turner
  

The challenge will continue annually for four more years. This year's competition establishes baselines for more difficult standards next year, when the total prize money will increase to $300,000. The total prize money provided by NASA for all five years is $2 million, NASA says.

Centennial Challenges is an element of NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program. The challenges promote technical innovation through prize competitions to support NASA's plan to return to the moon and journey to Mars.

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US Air Chief Defends Delta Merger

The head of US Air (LCC) defends its desired merger with Delta Air Lines as creating a stronger airline for consumers to rely on.

Others, including the head of Delta Air Lines, criticized the deal on Capitol Hill as a hostile takeover attempt that will hurt the traveling public.

"After the merger, 81% of US Airways/Delta passengers will have low-cost carrier competition at their local airports. An additional 13% will have access to such service within 100 miles," says W. Douglas Parker, chairman and CEO of US Airways Group.

The merger will, for example, allow the combined airline to lower fares in Harrisburg, Pa., enabling US Airways to recapture traffic that has been driving from central Pennsylvania to Baltimore for lower fares, Parker says.

"This phenomenon is repeated in communities big and small throughout the United States. The old US Airways would lose money on every ticket sold were it to have lowered fares in markets where it did not directly face low-cost competition, in places such as Harrisburg, Pa., Wilmington, NC or Huntsville, Ala. In sharp contrast, the new US Airways has a cost structure that permits it to lower fares and remain profitable, and indeed, we have to in order to competer with the growing low cost carriers," he says.

Parker also put forward several other assertions to defend the merger, saying:

1. Every U.S. city currently served by either airline will continue to have service from the new company.

2. On the labor front, we have made several commitments to the employees and unions of US Airways and Delta. We have committed to moving to the highest common denominator on labor costs for all employee groups. We have committed to not furlough frontline employees of either US Airways or Delta. Instead, we plan to manage the mainline operational employee reductions through attrition and other voluntary means, just as we did successfully in the US Airways/America West merger. We have committed to allowing Delta’s employees, the vast majority of whom are not represented by a union, to decide for themselves the question of union representation, and to do so without management opposition. And we have committed to honoring the terms of all labor agreements—including the Delta pilot agreement. Finally, and importantly, we will not close any hubs in either the current Delta or US Airways’ networks.

3. We expect that at the appropriate time the Department of Justice (DOJ) will fully investigate the merger. We plan to work cooperatively with DOJ during the investigation and have begun to do so already. We spent a lot of time prior to making our bid for Delta considering the many potential antitrust issues, and we believe that our transaction is beneficial for consumers, communities and a major step toward building a company that will provide stability for its employees over the long-term.

4. This merger is in the best interest of consumers. Our synergies are not predicated on raising fares. They are predicated on gaining efficiencies by cutting duplicative costs in locations served today by both US Airways and Delta. If we were planning, as our critics claim, to gain synergies by raising fares, that plan would fail in the long run, because low-cost carriers would come in and undercut the higher fares. The industry is brutally competitive today and will remain so even after this merger. Our model is based on a sustainable plan to serve markets at a lower cost, and thereby be able to compete with low-cost carriers on price.


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Message on Capitol Hill: Airliner Merger to Hurt Consumers

Experts, stakeholders and lawmakers alike rose on Capitol Hill to question the proposed merger of US Air (LCC) and Delta Airlines (DALRQ), saying the combination could cut competition and hurt consumers.

U.S. domestic airlines have lost nearly $40 billion in the last five years, but after intense restructuring among the major carriers, the industry may have turned a corner, notes U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that held a hearing looking at airline competitiveness.

Even conservative estimates suggest the airline industry will turn a profit of $4 billion in 2007, Inouye says. Despite the positive outlook, most industry observers warn that external factors or other negative business trends could dramatically impact any potential profits next year or beyond, Inouye adds.

"Aviation is vitally important to our nation’s system of transportation and commerce. We must be quite certain that the likely benefits of various merger proposals far outweigh any potential consequences," he says.

The airline industry has seen a pause in mergers in the past half-decade, as the airline industry restructured but that does not change concerns about anti-consumer and anti-competitive effects of mergers in the airline industry, says Mark Cooper, director of research, Consumer Federation of America.

"The elimination of competition and the reinforcement of dominant fortress hubs inevitably raise concerns about rising prices," Cooper says. "Competitive entry in the industry, to the extent it can discipline the abuse of market power, is highly restricted, limited to selective, high volume routes and markets. The so-called low cost airlines would leave more than half the country unserved."

Financial analysts generally agree that consolidation will be good for the airline industry because it will quickly ease problems of overcapacity, Inouye says.

"However, industry is just one part of the equation the Congress must consider," he says. "We must also weigh the extent to which consolidation is in the best interest of consumers, particularly since the impact of decreased capacity on travelers and local communities is less clear. "

Gerald Grinstein, chief executive of Delta Air Lines, also weighed in against the merger, which he likened to a hostile takeover on the part of U.S. Air Lines.

"We believe US Airways’ unsolicited and anticompetitive proposal does not meet antitrust standards, and would harm employees, consumers and communities. It would create a much weaker combined carrier that would threaten the future stability of our nation’s air transportation industry," Grinstein says. "It would reverse the remarkable progress Delta has made. Let me be clear – this is a hostile takeover bid; not a consensual merger."

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