The $10 million per year FY 2011 request for Centennial Challenges will allow NASA to pursue new and more ambitious prize competitions. Topics for future challenges that are under consideration include revolutionary energy storage systems, solar and other renewable energy technologies, laser communications, demonstrating near-Earth object survey and deflection strategies, innovative approaches to improving the safety and efficiency of aviation systems including Next Generation Aeronautics efforts, closed-loop life support and other resource recycling techniques, and low-cost access to space. Annual funding for Centennial Challenges allows new prizes to be announced, addressing additional technology challenges that can benefit from the innovation of the Citizen inventor.

In addition, NASA is planning a one-day technical symposium this Thursday featuring winners of several of the recent Centennial Challenges. That will be followed Friday by a recognition ceremony for the winners, featuring NASA administrator Charles Bolden. There’s also talk that NASA will use the event to announce one or more new prizes.

The bad news was that there was a problem with the engine: a glitch in the cooling system caused some damage to the engine chamber and, instead of risking further damaging the engine and perhaps losing the vehicle, they elected not to make the return flight. They do have two more flight opportunities in October, and believe they’ll have new engine chambers ready to go by then to make another attempt.

You’d think the team might be a little down because they couldn’t make a complete Level 1 flight, but instead they seemed quite satisfied with the effort. Note that this was only the second free flight for Xombie, and the first was just late Tuesday afternoon. This flight was also much higher and longer than yesterday’s, and other than the engine problem everything went well.

I took some photos of the flight and will get some up this evening (I’m back at the conference for the remainder of the day), along with any additional notes. I suspect soon Masten and/or X PRIZE will also have some photos and videos of the flight posted online.

For some background, MSNBC and New Scientist published articles on the flight attempts by Armadillo (and Masten Space and Unreasonable Rocket, two other NGLLC teams planning Level 1 and Level 2 flight attempts). The setup at the airport is likely to be barebones, but I will be posting updates via Twitter as time and technology permit, as will @NGLLC09, the official Twitter account of the competition.

The press release, as well as a NEWS.com.au article, notes that her friends have created a “Will Emma Go to Space?” Facebook group to help her decide. She has until September 8 to choose a prize.

It looks the first team (or at least one of the first) to make an attempt will be Armadillo Aerospace, who won first prize in Level One last October. According to a post on the “Official Armadillo Q&A thread at The Space Fellowship, John Carmack said at the QuakeCon 2009 convention Thursday that their Level Two attempt is planned for Labor Day weekend, three weekends from now. That development was also picked by a GameSpot article about Carmack’s speech, although not specifically mentioning the Lunar Lander Challenge, only an upcoming “Labor Day launch”. There’s nothing official yet on the Armadillo Aerospace or competition web sites.

A couple of other items: the Space Fellowship post states that Armadillo has also been busy with Rocket Racing League vehicle test flights and that “AA would make a lot more progress in the next year for reasons he couldn’t announce yet.” On the other hand, though, Carmack said that since his gaming company, id Software, was sold this summer, “he feels compelled to produce and deliver, rather than working on fun extracurricular projects like Armadillo Aerospace.”

(As as for the Tether Strength competition: only one team, from Japan, participated this year, and its tether, made of carbon nanotube material, broke almost immediately after force was applied.)