No winners in NASA’s excavation contest
Four teams and some strange machines competed for $250,000 from NASA, but all walked away empty-handed.
NASA’s Regolith Excavation Challenge invited teams to build machines for digging mock moon dirt, or regolith, in a competition held in a 1-ton sandbox Saturday. But all the teams fell well short of the winning requirement of 330 pounds of regolith deposited in a container in 30 minutes.
An excavator built by Technology Ranch of Pismo Beach did the best, collecting just over 143 pounds in half an hour. The other three teams were from Rancho Palos Verdes; Berkley, Mich.; and Rolla, Miss.
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