Red Whittaker is Out of This World

On a table in William “Red” Whittaker’s office sits a globe of the Moon. The pallid white orb is covered by latitudinal and longitudinal lines, geographic designations, and a few points of historical interest. On the edge of the Sea of Tranquility, along the Moon’s equator, there is a simple dot Whittaker looks at a lot these days. It says simply, “Apollo 11, July 20, 1969.”

It’s a reminder for Whittaker, Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and the founder of the Field Robotics Center and the Robotics Engineering Consortium, of where he wants to go. Or rather, where he wants his robots to go. Whittaker is plotting a mission to the Moon for sometime next year, when he hopes to claim the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. The award will go to the first privately-funded team to land a robotic rover on the Moon, run the vehicle half a kilometer, and beam high-definition images and data back to the earth.

Whittaker’s Astrobotic team is one of 10 from around the world competing for the prize. He plans to touch land his rover at Apollo 11’s famed landing site, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounced around in their Moon suits almost 40 years ago. The rover will search for artifacts left by that mission--the American flag and the astronauts’ footsteps--if they’ve survived the Moon’s solar wind or pellets from broken up meteors.

It’s a fitting mission for Whittaker, A former Marine, he is a tall, imposing man with a handshake that could reduce the contents of a box of chalk to dust.

If anyone is ready for the mission, colleagues say, it’s Whittaker.

“He’s a whirlwind—a mini-hurricane, but he gets things done,” says Tony Spear, the former NASA engineer Whittaker has brought on as the mission’s project manager.

Whittaker led several CMU-based teams to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Grand Challenge, a Department of Defense-funded race for unmanned vehicles. In November, Whittaker’s Tartan Racing team won the event, besting some of the top robotics research labs in the country in what was termed the “Urban Challenge”, because the vehicles had to navigate traffic, follow rules of the road, and obey speed limits. In 2005, his entries H1ghlander and Sandstorm came in 2nd and 3rd respectively, after each completed a 132-mile course in the California desert.

The Making of a Legend
Whittaker has shown he’s always been ready to push boundaries. In 1979, just after receiving his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Whittaker designed a robot to clean up radioactive material at Three Mile Island nuclear plant. He’s also designed bots to work in sewers, map collapsed mines, and pick up meteorites in Antarctica.

But none of these compare to the task at hand. Whittaker must design a robotic rover that can navigate the Moon’s rocky terrain and withstand temperatures of more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit while the sun is out. “Building what is essentially a mobile, high-definition television station to broadcast from a quarter of a million miles away is certainly going to require some technological gymnastics,” Whittaker says.

Many of the gymnastics will be handled by Spear, a former engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Spear was project manager for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission, an experience he calls “hitting the space lottery.” His team successfully deployed the Sojourner rover on the Mars in 1997, sending back thousands of images from the Red Planet.

“Tony is the best in the game,” Whittaker says. “There’s nothing that replaces experience. Tony works hard and he works smart.”

Spear will design the craft that brings the rover to the Moon.

It's the Landing, Stupid
“Landing is always the scariest part. Landing on Mars without splattering was probably our biggest achievement.” For that landing, Spear designed huge airbags for the lander to touch down on. To land on the Moon, he plans to use a traditional rocket-braking system.

Launching a mission to the Moon on a budget presents another problem. For starters, what does a ride to space cost? Spear says the team might hire a $20 million ride aboard an Athena Rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Fla. For a relatively inexpensive, $5 million, they could hitch a ride as a “secondary payload” on a rocket. The problem with that, Spear says, is “you have to leave when the bus leaves.”

Since time is of the essence, that might not work for Tranquility Trek, the name Whittaker has given the mission.  

“You go too early, you miss an important detail,” says Whittaker. “You wait too long, or you go too late and someone will get there first. One of the huge challenges of a private mission is managing the economy of it.”

Whittaker is plotting his mission in a hangar-like room straight out of Dr. No. His two-story workshop sits at the bottom of a building nestled into the side of a hill on Carnegie Mellon’s Oakland campus. A metal catwalk hovers above the work space, which is rigged out with an assortment of cranes, pulleys, and neatly stacked toolchests.  

In an adjacent room sits the first generation of Whittaker’s lunar rover—essentially a four-by-four box covered with tiny solar panels and four metal mesh wheels. There’s a foot-long antenna on top designed to articulate toward the earth as the rover moves across the Moon. The suspension doesn’t connect to the chassis, the better to deal with the rocky surface.

Whittaker is testing the vehicle out at his research lab’s “Moonyard”, an old brownfield he’s leasing on the site of the old LTV Steel coke works. He’ll keep making the vehicle lighter, to better navigate on the Moon, which has one-sixth the gravitational pull of the Earth.

Whittaker says he wants to change how people think of robots. “The challenges are effective at accelerating the technology and changing the belief of the world of what robotics can do,” he says. “You know, there was a time when a computer couldn’t play tic-tac-toe.”

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Captions:

Red Whitaker in the lab at the CMU robotics center

"Still plays with trucks"

Whitaker with his eyes - and hands - on the prize

Where it starts

All photographs copyright Brian Cohen