NASA Cube Quest Challenge offers $5 million prize money
NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge is the first in-space competition that offers whopping $5 million prize money. Also, competitors can get a chance to participate in space exploration and technology development, fly their own CubeSat to the moon and beyond as secondary payload on first integrated flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
“NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge will engage teams in the development of the new technologies that will advance the state of the art of CubeSats and demonstrate their capabilities as viable deep space explorers,” said Michael Gazarik, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Prize competitions like this engage the general public and directly contribute to NASA’s goals while serving as a tool for open innovation.”
Challenge objectives
- Designing, building and delivering flight qualified, small satellites capable of advanced operations.
- Ground Tournaments: $500,000 in the four qualifying ground tournaments to determine who will have the ability to fly on the first SLS flight;
- Lunar Derby: $1.5 million for demonstrating communication and CubeSat durability at a distance greater than almost 2.5 million miles (4,000,000 km), 10 times the distance from the Earth to the moon; and
- Deep Space Derby: $3 million for demonstrating the ability to place a CubeSat in a stable lunar orbit and demonstrate communication and durability near the moon.
“Cube Quest is an important competition for the agency as well as the commercial space sector,” said Eric Eberly, deputy program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “If we can produce capabilities usually associated with larger spacecraft in the much smaller platform of CubeSats, a dramatic improvement in the affordability of space missions will result, greatly increasing science and research possibilities.”
NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program is part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, which is responsible for innovating, developing, testing and flying hardware for use on future NASA missions. During the next 18 months, the directorate will make significant new investments to address several high-priority challenges for achieving safe and affordable deep space exploration. For more information about the directorate, visit:
For more information on the Cube Quest Challenge, visit:
To learn more about NASA’s challenges and citizen science efforts, visit:
