John Carmack (Armadillo Aerospace) at NASA HQ

John Carmack accepts an award at NASA HQ and discusses how rocket engineering compares to the complexity of software development.

John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace accepts his $350,000 Prize for winning Level 1 of the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The Prize purse was put up by NASA as part of their Centennial Challenges and the competition was administered by the X PRIZE Foundation. The Challenge is designed to accelerate commercial technological developments supporting the birth of a new generation of Lunar Landers capable of ferrying payloads or humans back and forth between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. Such a vehicle would have direct application to NASAs space exploration goals as well as the personal spaceflight industry, including the Google Lunar X PRIZE competitors. Additionally, the challenge will help industry develop the operational capacity to launch quick turnaround vertical take-off, vertical landing vehicles, which will be of significant use to many facets of the commercial launch procurement market. The Competition is divided into two levels. Level 1 requires a rocket to take off from a designated launch area, rocket up to 150 feet (50 meters) altitude, then hover for 90 seconds while landing precisely on a landing pad 50 meters away. The flight must then be repeated in reverse—and both flights, along with all of the necessary preparation for each, must take place within a two and a half hour period.