By all accounts it was a disappointing weekend.

After all, it’s one thing to build a moon lander prototype, dubbed Pixel,  from scratch, spend $200,000 of your own money, fly it successfully, only to have it crash before the competition—a competition in which one is the only competitor. It’s quite another to not win the $1.5 million prize, and wait again for the next opportunity to win—next year.

Interviewed after his return to Mesquite, Texas, John Carmack, the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, as well as the chief programmer and co-founder of game company Id Software, told the tale of how a dozen tiny setbacks denied his space startup its moment of glory.

After four successful pre-flights prior to the X-Prize competition—an annual space technology contest held in Las Cruces, New Mexico— Armadillo was confident they’d bring home the prize. After all, they were competing against themselves—no other competitor had developed a successful moon lander prototype. If their flight was successful, the prize was as good as theirs.

But a test flight for the Federal Aviation Administration’s administrator for Commercial Space Transportation—necessary to get Armadillo’s permit validated to fly at the competition—went awry.

The Pixel craft lifted off, but the Armadillo crew decided that because it was a test flight they would only take it up 25 feet, instead of the 150 foot ascent they planned to do at the contest. That modest height kicked up an enormous dust cloud­, rendering it invisible to the operators. 

“It was like a tornado. We couldn’t see anything,” Mr. Carmack said.

So Mr. Carmack kicked in the automated landing software, and when the cloud cleared, the vehicle was still 10 feet off the pad as the engines cut. Then it fell, tipping over on its side.  Fortunately, Pixel was sufficiently rugged to endure the fall and the tip over, but that incident was just a sign of things to come.

Other hitches came in the form of global positioning information. In the contest, the objective is to have the lander ascend to fifty meters from one pad, travel over to another pad, and set down. Mr. Carmack’s software needed “earth-centered, earth-fixed” data.

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