Tag: Moon

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PT Scientists go with Spaceflight for moonshot

Lander and rover
PTScientists’ ALINA lander is designed to carry two Audi Lunar Quattro rovers to the moon’s surface. (PTScientists Photo)

A German team that’s going after the Google Lunar XPRIZE has secured a contract with Seattle-based Spaceflight to get its rover-carrying lander to the moon.

PTScientists, based in Berlin, announced the deal today, and Spaceflight confirmed the partnership. If the contract is verified by the $30 million contest’s organizers at XPRIZE, the group will join three other contestants in the home stretch for the top prize for commercial lunar exploration.

Spaceflight struck a similar deal last year with an Israeli-based GLXP team, SpaceIL. The two other verified teams are Moon Express and Synergy Moon.

There are 16 teams in the GLXP hunt, but they have to have verified launch contracts by the end of this year in order to stay in the competition.

The top prize of $20 million will go to the first team to send a spacecraft to the moon and have it travel more than 500 meters (1,640 feet) while sending back images and video. Other prizes are being offered as extra incentives. If no team gets to the moon by the end of 2017, all those prizes go poof.

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Supermoon puts Buzz Aldrin in beast mode

This week’s supermoon has been pretty much clouded out in Seattle, but it appears to have had an effect on Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.

In a Twitter update, the 86-year-old space icon mugged for the camera, werewolf-style, and said it took all his willpower to stop from howling.

Aldrin doesn’t shy away from media moments, whether it’s cutting a rug on “Dancing With the Stars” or putting in a cameo on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock.”

On a 2010 episode, Aldrin invited series star Tina Fey to join him in yelling at the moon over Manhattan. Fey obliged, but it was Aldrin who showed the moon who’s boss. “I own you! I walked on your face!” he shouted.

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This supermoon will be extra-super

Seattle photographer Tim Durkan captured this view of the full moon behind the Space Needle. (Credit: TimDurkan.com)
Seattle photographer Tim Durkan captured this view of the full moon behind the Space Needle. (Credit: TimDurkan.com)

The full moon is looking bigger and brighter this week than it’s looked since 1948 – and although you may not notice just how much more super this “supermoon” is, it’s definitely worth looking up. If the skies are ever clear, that is.

The moon is due to be at its closest at 3:22 a.m. PT Nov. 14, and it’ll reach the peak of its full phase a few hours later at 5:52 a.m. The bottom line is that the lunar disk will look about 14 percent wider than it does at its farthest distance from Earth, and shine about 30 percent brighter.

This doesn’t mean you’d have to get up in the wee hours to catch a super view.

“I’ve been telling people to go out at night on either Sunday or Monday night to see the supermoon,” Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, said in a NASA feature about the phenomenon. “The difference in distance from one night to the next will be very subtle, so if it’s cloudy on Sunday, go out on Monday.”

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NASA puts out call for lunar experiments

Image: Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows a Moon Express lander in lunar orbit. (Credit: Moon Express)

NASA wants suggestions for experiments that can be sent to the moon on commercial spacecraft – and Moon Express, one of the companies building those spacecraft, wants to kick in up to $500,000 per experiment.

The experiments would be aimed at filling the “strategic knowledge gaps” for lunar exploration, NASA said in today’s request for information, which was timed to coincide with this week’s meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group in Columbia, Md.

The time frame for the proposed experiments – in the range of 2017 to 2020 – seems tailor-made for Moon Express, which is one of several teams going after the top award in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

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FAA suggests a marketplace for Moon Village

Moon Village
An artist’s conception shows a permanent lunar base that’s part of the European Space Agency’s “Moon Village” vision. (Credit: ESA)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – If the world wants to create a village on the moon, the Federal Aviation Administration is willing to start up an online trading post for lunar services.

George Nield, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, says he doesn’t even need to wait for the village to be built.

Nield offered to set up what he called LMASS – the Lunar Marketplace and Swap Shop – during one of today’s sessions at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.

“Think of it as a corkboard,” Nield said. The potential traders could include businesses that are working on ways to move cargo from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit, or on moon landers, or on habitats, or surface transportation, or communication services, or other technologies that will eventually be needed for lunar operations.

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Blue Origin sets sights on Mars and the moon

Image: Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, inspects Blue Origin’s launch facility in West Texas before a test flight in April 2015. (Credit: Blue Origin)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – SpaceX isn’t the only billionaire-backed company that’s planning to go to Mars: Blue Origin, the space venture created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is also taking aim at Mars, the moon and other deep-space destinations.

Those missions are implied in Bezos’ long-term vision of having millions of people living and working in space, Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson said today at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.

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Moon Express wins U.S. green light for moonshot

Image: Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows the Moon Express MX-1 lander in lunar orbit. (Credit: Moon Express)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Moon Express says it has received preliminary clearance for the robotic lander that it plans to send to the moon next year, after a voluntary payload review involving the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies.

The clearance doesn’t represent final regulatory approval for the mission, although some reports may be giving that impression. The FAA will still have to grant a launch license before Moon Express can blast off.

Nevertheless, Moon Express’ executives hailed the successful payload review as a significant step toward what could be the first commercial mission to another celestial body. Moon Express CEO Bob Richards called it a “landmark decision.”

“We are now free to set sail as explorers to Earth’s eighth continent, the moon, seeking new knowledge and resources to expand Earth’s economic sphere for the benefit of all humanity,” Richards said in a statement issued today.

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Stage set for private missions to moon, Mars

Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows Moon Express’ MX-1 lander extending its robotic arm to take a “selfie” of the spacecraft on the lunar surface with Earth in the background. (Credit: Moon Express)

After months of discussion, federal agencies are closing in on a process to approve commercial missions to other celestial bodies – including the moon, Mars and asteroids.

The groundwork for the process was laid in April, when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told Congress that the Transportation Department was the most appropriate entity to approve new kinds of commercial space missions such as on-orbit satellite servicing and trips beyond Earth orbit.

Now the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies are “working through the interagency process to ensure a mechanism is in place that permits emerging commercial space operations,” FAA spokesman Hank Price said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

The issue was brought to a head when Moon Express, one of the companies chasing the Google Lunar X Prize, asked the FAA to review its plans to put a lander on the moon next year. The FAA is part of the Transportation Department. Its Office of Commercial Space Transportation is currently in charge of approving commercial space launches and re-entries, but not activities in orbit or in deep space.

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Moon or Mars: Which will next president pick?

Image: Moon Village
An artist’s conception shows a permanent lunar base that’s part of the European Space Agency’s “Moon Village” vision. (Credit: ESA)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Over the past eight years, the focus of NASA’s space vision has shifted from the moon, to a near-Earth asteroid, to the journey to Mars. The European Space Agency’s director-general, meanwhile, has been talking up the prospect of building a Moon Village. And one of the latest buzzwords for commercial space ventures is “cislunar” – that is, space operations in the vicinity of the moon.

What’s a future president to do?

Space policy ranks among the least prominent issues on the campaign agenda: GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump, for example, says he loves space exploration but thinks it’s more important to fix potholes on Earth. Nevertheless, leaders of the space industry say the next president will play a key role in determining the world’s future course on the final frontier.

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Moon Express asks FAA to review lunar mission

An artist’s conception shows the Moon Express MX-1 spacecraft orbiting the moon. (Credit: Moon Express)
An artist’s conce[t shows the Moon Express MX-1 lander orbiting the moon. (Credit: Moon Express)
Moon Express, the lunar exploration venture backed by Seattle tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, says it’s asking the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct a payload review of its spacecraft and plans for a mission to the moon in 2017.

The request is aimed at heading off regulatory uncertainty about the mission, which is aimed at winning the Google Lunar X Prize.

Moon Express ranks among the front-runners in the $30 million competition, which calls for teams to send landers to the moon, travel along the surface and send back real-time video by the end of next year.

Such a feat would represent a first for commercial space ventures, but because it’s unprecedented, it’s not fully clear what kind of regulatory go-ahead would be required for a U.S.-based company. So far, only governmental space programs have sent probes beyond Earth orbit.

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