Tales of the Heliosphere blog posts photos and videos from the X Prize Cup: Pictures At A Rocket Exhibition: X Prize Cup 2006 - Tales of the Heliosphere - Oct.23.06.

TDR also says this about the usefulness of the Lunar Lander Challenge:

To give Armadillo its due, the company's part-time work force did make a reusable rocket that flew three times in two days before it crashed. Armadillo's attempts at the prize were inspiring to see and it was heartbreaking when little Pixel finally fell to its doom. On the other hand, Armadillo is competing for a NASA funded prize but is making nothing that NASA can use and in the end, the company failed to win the prize. It's not clear from that how NASA or its contractors should be shamed. Nor is it clear just what NASA hopes to get from this particular prize competition.

It's true that NASA will not use the the Pixel vehicle design for its lunar lander. You can't even point to a particular component on it and say that a similar item will definitely be used on NASA's vehicle. However, that doesn't mean Pixel can't have a big impact on the lunar lander program.

Pixel actually flew four times in three days and John Carmack now says that the damage on the last flight was not as severe as initially indicated and Pixel may fly again. A demonstrator project can demonstrate a new technology but it can also use a combination of current technologies to demonstrate new capabilities for a system as a whole. Pixel demonstrated a number of broad system lessons that NASA should could apply to its lunar lander and to its rocket vehicle development in general:
* A rocket vehicle doesn't have to be a fragile, delicate thing but can be robust enough to fly repeatedly with minimal turnaround time.
* A lunar vehicle for a lunar base could be built that is so tough that if it lands hard or even falls over, it can still fly again.
* It can be well worth sacrificing some raw performance to attain fast, low cost operations.
* Avoid unnecessary complexities like poisonous hypergolic fuels that undercut operational practicality.
* A real lunar vehicle should not cost 10 thousand times what it took to build Pixel.

These are not hard, technical lessons from Pixel but relate to subjective attitudes and philosophies. The architecture for the Constellation lunar program did not emerge mechanically from a set of equations solved by Mike Griffin. It came about because of his negative attitude, and that of many NASA managers, towards the feasibility of low cost reusability. The lunar program is based on extremely expensive single use, throwaway systems throughout.

Pete Worden, currently head of NASA Ames, was one of the judges for the Lunar Lander Challenge. He had been considered a strong candidate for the NASA administrator job but his background with missile defense apparently made his nomination politically untenable. Worden participated in the DC-X project that successfully demonstrated that a liquid fueled rocket vehicle could be flown repeatedly and after a short turnaround time. He has seen low cost reusability demonstrated up close and knows that it is feasible. If he had become head of NASA, the Constellation architecture almost certainly would be radically different from what it is today.

Pixel won't change attitudes within NASA immediately but I expect that as more and more reusable rocket vehicles are demonstrated in the next few years by private organizations, the Constellation architecture will be recognized even within NASA as an anachronism long before the first lunar flight is attempted.