Mastodawn

Phil Stooke Apr 27

... I originally gave it the date 1973, and I have pushed it back to 1972 (revised part 6 will be available shortly). Harvest Moon was a concept involving flying a spare Saturn rocket and Apollo spacecraft to the Moon to return lunar samples for sale to collectors, jewellers and scientists, supposedly covering the cost of the mission. Hardware was 'spare' because 3 of the 10 planned landings were cancelled. The concept collapsed because NASA and the DOD would not support the flight.
#moon

Phil Stooke Apr 27

Why not support it? It would go to the Apollo 15 site with that crew (they were already trained for it), but they were under a cloud because of a scandal involving postal covers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15_postal_covers_incident ). Also DOD would not provide the navy resources for splashdown, or NASA for tracking, mission control etc.

What would the crew do if Harvest Moon happened? According to space enthusiast Doug Van Dorn they would collect Apollo 15 hardware...
#moon

Apollo 15 postal covers incident - Wikipedia

Phil Stooke Apr 27

... and go to the North Complex, a possible volcanic hill dropped from EVA 3 of that mission. These would be 2 walking EVAs. They would deploy some experiments including a biology module, an observatory and a science rover. The landing site would be between the Apollo 15 site and North Complex. The map suggests a smooth location in that area. The plan was unrealistic from the start.
#maps #moon

About 20 years after Harvest Moon a new crop of commercial missions appeared. Advances in computing, rocketry etc. suggested to some that a small company could do what only superpowers had done in the 60s - land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon. Our first case is LunaCorp of Arlington, Virginia. They teamed up with the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who would provide rovers. They are an ancestor of today's Astrobotic, the CLPS company.
#moon

LunaCorp's rovers might have been used for science or more entertainment-related missions. The latter got more publicity. Live video and motion sensor data would control simulators on Earth to duplicate the experience of driving on the Moon. Simulators in theme parks would let the public 'join' the ride, and with safeguards customers might also drive the rover briefly. That revenue source would support the mission. It's a good idea, just not feasible at the time. Where would they go?
#moon

LunaCorp described a 'Grand Apollo Tour' which would land near the Apollo 11 site to view the LM carefully, not disturbing the historic site. They would visit Surveyor 5 and Ranger 8 nearby, then head north to Apollo 17 and finally to Lunokhod-2, 1000 km altogether. The map at left shows a schematic route with a side trip to Ranger 6 (a study by one of my students). A more scientific mission called Icebreaker is shown at right. It assumes space agency funding.
#maps #moon

The rover team at Carnegie-Mellon pushed these ideas hard. After LunaCorp couldn't raise the funds for it they proposed the idea to NASA's Discovery Program under the names Lunar Ice and Victoria. A later version, again private (i.e. not for Discovery), was called LunaQuest. All this came to nothing, except that Astrobotic is a direct descendant of these efforts. They will try again later this year with their big Griffin lander and two rovers.
#moon

Phil Stooke Apr 30

Sorry I missed a post yesterday - technical difficulties at this end. To continue our story... I noticed I didn't put a date on the LunaCorp posts - this was all happening in the mid- to late-1990s. It failed because they could not raise the money. The same fate befell today's company, Applied Space Resources (ASR) of Hicksville, New York. They intended to fly a private lunar sample return mission called Lunar Retriever in the late 1990s.
#moon

Phil Stooke Apr 30

ASR would sell samples for scientific research and to collectors, jewellers or other commercial markets. They had plans for several missions with dog-related names like Lunar Husky. But where to land? The target, Mare Nectaris, offered mare basalts and Theophilus ejecta, which would include Nectaris basin rim material. The site shown on the company website was at 16 S, 35 E, near the middle of the mare. Dating Nectaris would be an important addition to the lunar chronology.
#moon

Phil Stooke Apr 30

I knew the ASR people and advised moving closer to Theophilus to increase the amount of ejecta collected (near 14 S, 31 E). Later ASR talked of a scenically dramatic site just south of the central peak of Theophilus. This map shows their sites and the nearby SLIM site, also chosen to analyze Theophilus ejecta. But the money could not be found and the plans came to nothing. Our next mission will try yet another money-making strategy.
#maps #moon

Phil Stooke May 1

Data sales are another strategy for making money from commercial missions. Transorbital, Inc. of La Jolla, California was set up in 1998 and planned a lunar orbiter and landers. The orbiter, in about 2001, would transmit high resolution images of the Moon and the company would sell or license data to space agencies and others (e.g video for movies, stills for advertising). The landers (called Electra) would also provide images for sale and might carry cargo for a fee.
#moon

Phil Stooke May 1

Transorbital was linked to a private lunar base initiative, Artemis Society International. One Electra lander could go to the preferred Artemis site in Mare Anguis just east of Mare Crisium (22.6 N, 67.7 E). The map shows 3 Artemis sites and the Electra site.

Needless to say, Transorbital couldn't raise enough funds to fly. These ideas are only just becoming feasible now - Firefly carried cargo and sold data like eclipse and sunset images to NASA a year ago.
#maps #moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlastOff!_Corporation

Phil Stooke May 1

A few other ideas for private lunar missions were tried in the years around 2000. Perhaps the best-known was Blastoff! - another entertainment scheme involving three rovers:

All these companies suffered from the same problem: the difficulty of raising money. Investors were not convinced it could be done. How can we get past that? The X Prize Foundation decided to try again a few years later.
#moon

BlastOff! Corporation - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize

Phil Stooke May 2

Prizes to spur innovation have a long history - the Longitude Prize, Lindbergh's Orteig Prize and others. The X Prize Foundation thought to follow those with new prizes for contemporary issues, and seemed to have succeeded with the original X Prize (later called the Ansari X Prize) for sub-orbital spaceflight:

I won't get into the real value of what was accomplished by the winning team, but it did lead to a larger space-related prize...
#moon #GLXP

Ansari X Prize - Wikipedia

Phil Stooke May 2

Google put up a $20 million prize (and more later) but the X Prize Foundation ran the competition, announcing in in September 2007. To win, a non-government team had to land on he Moon, move 500 m and transmit some specified data before the end of 2012. 20 million is not enough to do this so additional funding was always expected - sponsorships, sales of data or cargo delivery etc. Many space enthusiasts thought modern technology would make it possible. It was not to be.
#moon #GLXP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Ships

Phil Stooke May 2

This story is a sort of Odyssey... but the Iliad contains a Catalogue of Ships:

So that is where we will start, with a Catalogue of GLXP Teams. What a varied lot they were, from serious teams run by aerospace professionals to people tinkering in their garages. I will present them in the order in which they joined the competition.
#moon #GLXP

Catalogue of Ships - Wikipedia

Phil Stooke May 3

Just before we look at GLXP teams I should add some other details. The prize was $20 million up to the end of 2012 or $15 million up to the end of 2014. This changed frequently. In 2010 the deadline became the end of 2015. The prize would fall by $5 million if a government mission landed first, a condition dropped in late 2013 as China prepared its Chang-E 3. A second prize was added and more prizes for some additional tasks like surviving the lunar night. It got quite complicated.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 3

Now we can start looking at teams, with maps of landing sites where needed. We go in order of joining, and alphabetical order in groups joining at the same time. The first was Odyssey Moon, led by Bob Richards and run from the Isle of Man. It formed before the GLXP and joined as soon as it could. Alan Stern and Paul Spudis joined as advisors. Like all teams their fundraising was hurt by the 2008 economic crisis. In 2010 Richards bailed out (taking many of the team with him)...
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 3

to form a new US-based team with better financial prospects. Odyssey Moon struggled to continue, and late in 2012 it merged with Israeli team SpaceIL and continued under that name. While it was operating the team mentioned landing in a dark pyroclastic deposit such as Rima Bode or Sulpicius Gallus. Apollo sites were considered later. The lander would hop to meet the GLXP movement goal, but later missions might use rovers or do sample return.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 4

21 February 2008: the first ten registered teams (including Odyssey Moon) were introduced at Google's campus in Mountain View, CA. One was ARCA (Romanian acronym for Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association). Most teams planned to buy a launch but ARCA decided to build its own rocket, which never seemed very realistic. Their small rocket would launch from a balloon (and later a supersonic jet plane). These plans never came to anything. ARCA had been in the first X Prize...
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 4

And they continued working on ever more tenuous plans after the X Prize ended, moving from Romania to the US and back. My main interest is always landing sites. Romania is home to the Carpathian Mountains so they decided to land in southern Mare Imbrium within view of the Montes Carpatus (named after the Carpathians, obviously... there's a story in that association, he said cryptically with an eye to a future post).
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 5

Robotic vehicle expert William 'Red' Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon University had been involved with Lunacorp and the Icebreaker Discovery mission proposal, and now headed Astrobotic, our next GLXP team. Astrobotic persisted after the GLXP ended and is now part of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program, one of a small number of teams who made that jump. We will spend more time on this interesting team beginning with their GLXP plans.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 5

As initially described by Astrobotic, in a mission called ‘Tranquility Trek’ a lander named Artemis would deploy a rover called Red Rover about 500 m from the Apollo 11 LM descent stage near the 40th anniversary of that landing. The rover would in fact touch down just after the first lunar sunrise following the anniversary, on 26 or 27 July 2009. After examining the Apollo 11 site it would set off on a 300 km trek to the Apollo 16 site.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 5

The Astrobotic mission plan evolved rapidly during the first year, soon shifting to a shorter ‘Tranquility Trek’ of about 30 km from the Apollo 11 site to Surveyor 5. An Astrobotic video in 2010 showed the rover landing near the Tranquillitatis skylight, driving to its edge to view the interior, and then driving 300 km to the Apollo 11 site to view sunset near the LM. The map shows these 3 suggested missions. Their plans went far beyond this, as we will see.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 6

The rover missions we just looked at were for the first Astrobotic mission, to win the Google Lunar X Prize, but the team had ambitions far beyond that. This table lists several versions of their plans. The missions are more overtly for science or engineering development. Some might become Discovery or other NASA missions, others might support Constellation. The dates given are expected launch dates. This is only just becoming feasible today.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 6

Astrobotic didn't just design rovers, they put an enormous effort into background research (e.g. chilling batteries in liquid nitrogen for lunar night survival). These maps show studies for polar missions, including power generation and traverse planning. This is only a glimpse at what they did, there is lots more. The 'sustained illumination route' is always in sunlight and they had other versions of it, farther from the pole.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 7

The GLXP competition deadline was extended several times as funding difficulties continued. Tech optimism made some think that building a lander would be easy 40 years after Apollo, but it turns out there is a reason why space is expensive. Astrobotic amended its plans several times but they settled on exploring a skylight - a vertical entrance into a cave, especially a lava tube. The first examples were discovered in Japan's Kaguya mission data and LRO found more.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 7

This map shows the site Astrobotic settled on, in a place ominously called Lacus Mortis. The white box shows the landing target (next post). An ellipse south of the box became the target when the pinpoint landing needed for a skylight mission seemed too difficult for a first landing attempt. This area is several hundred km north of Apollo 17 and Lunokhod 2.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 8

Skylights have been of interest for years, but how would you go about exploring one? These maps illustrate Astrobotic's concept. The Lacus Mortis pits are mapped at top left. The eastern pit was chosen because it had a ramp of debris from a wall collapse. At lower left we see a scenario proposed by Kevin Peterson of Carnegie-Mellon (my version of his map is for the Tranquillitatis pit). The lander descent path flies over the pit for high resolution imaging...
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 8

... Then a rover drives to the pit and circles it, going as close as they dare to the rim at 2 places to look inside. Finally they circle back, looking in from several different vantage points. At right the actual target pit with its ramp on the east side is shown with a route illustrated by Red Whittaker. It's not clear if there is an accessible cave below those cliffs. There might be on the north side and the south side is in shadow. If only a rover could be sent into the pit...
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 8

Well, actually... Astrobotic's rover would not go into the pit but another team, Hakuto, of which more later, gave up on a lander and decided to fly its rover with Astrobotic for a subsidiary prize. Hakuto’s rover Moonraker would deploy a small secondary rover called Tetris which would attempt to descend into the Lacus Mortis pit on a tether. That would have been fun to watch.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 9

The Google Lunar X Prize ended in 2018 when it became apparent that no team could launch before the oft-postponed deadline. Astrobotic had in fact already withdrawn to pursue launch opportunities outside the GLXP, and it retained the Lacus Mortis landing site but moved away from the skylight. A first mission would not be able to land precisely enough to put a pit within the short range expected for the rover. They moved to a place which could fit a larger ellipse...
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 9

... We are moving away from the GLXP but I want to show the connection between GLXP and CLPS. This map shows 2 versions of the new ellipse. Hakuto would still fly a rover on the new mission. Then CLPS came along. Astrobotic got a mission and still aimed for this site until late 2022 when NASA asked that it move to the plains west of the Gruithuisen domes. Their lander failed after launch in January 2024. But even that is not quite the end of the story.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 9

A GLXP team, Hakuto, operated by a company called ispace, continued after the GLXP with funding raised by the company. It still considered Lacus Mortis to be its landing site for a while, probably closer to the skylight site than the larger ellipses. Eventually a new site selection process led by Jessica Flahaut and colleagues produced a new site list and Atlas crater was selected. The mission crashed near its target in April 2023.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 10

I am working my way through the Catalogue of Teams for the Google Lunar X Prize, through the set of 10 teams announced in February 2008. The next is Chandah (Sanskrit for Moon), led by Adil Jafry. It made no public signs of progress until it was merged into Moon Express in 2010. The spacecraft would have been called Shehrezade.

Next up is Frednet. At first they suggested landing near an Apollo site. They got more specific on their website in 2009...
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 10

... Frednet would use laser reflections from previously deployed reflectors as beacons to guide their landing. This limited their landings to the three Apollo sites with retroreflectors, Apollos 11, 14 and 15, and the two Lunokhod sites. By 2012 they were targeting one of the low latitude Apollo or Surveyor sites during descent. They would have 4 days of surface operations with a spherical rover before the end of 2015. The team withdrew from the competition at the end of 2013.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke

Our next GLXP team is Italia, an Italian team led by Amalia Ercoli-Finzi (Politecnico di Milano). Its spacecraft (both lander and rover) would be called Ascensio Machinae Ad Lunam Italica Arte (AMALIA), and might include one large rover or many small rovers. Exotic walking robot designs were circulated on the internet at first, but a more conventional wheeled rover was eventually chosen. The landing site was said to be near 0°, 0° in Sinus Medii.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 11

Italia did some serious work, but not all teams were so productive. Lunatrex was founded by inventor and entrepreneur Pete Bitar. Its spacecraft, called Tumbleweed, might carry one or more rovers. It was dissolved in December 2009 because of an internal legal dispute and reappeared in modified form in 2010 as LUNARecon but left the competition very soon afterwards.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 12

Another of the set of 10 teams introduced in February 2008 was Micro-Space, led by Richard Speck, who had plans for robotic and human lunar exploration using very light spacecraft. Micro-Space had also competed in the Ansari X PRIZE and the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Their GLXP spacecraft was called the Human Lunar Lander as it was derived from their larger plan. Speck died in October 2010 and the team withdrew in November.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 12

I am not aware of any work done by Micro-Space on landing sites, but I could be wrong (it depends what was made public, of course). They had some sort of connection with Open Luna, a group who pushed for the same goal and who did do some landing site work which I had some involvement in. But that is not really Micro-Space so I will skip it. The 'very light spacecraft' really were very light - open frames like a hang-glider with the suited astronaut perched on it. You go first!
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 12

Quantum 3, headed by Paul Carliner of Washington, D. C. and former NASA manager Courtney Stadd, withdrew later in 2008. The team had said it would land a spacecraft called Moondancer at an unspecified site in Mare Tranquillitatis. I don't know any more about them.

That leaves one more team from the first ten - which we will look at tomorrow. There's a bit more to say about them.
#moon #GLXP

The last of the February 2008 teams, the Southern California Selene Group (SCSG) was started by Harold Rosen, who had worked at Hughes on the first communication satellite, Syncom, in the 1960s. He had promoted a spin-stabilized lander for the Surveyor program, a design which was rejected in favour of the three-axis-stabilized tripod Surveyor which flew successfully in 1966. SCSG would use his old design, whose landing legs were mounted on a despun section.
#moon #GLXP

SCSG announced a landing site near 0° N, 70° W for their spacecraft 'Spirit of Southern California'. This location would allow a relatively easy vertical descent, an idea which had also driven the Luna 9 and Surveyor 1 site selections. They also referred to being 'within reach of Luna 9', which lay 300 km from their original target and might have made an alternative target if its exact location was well known. But it was not, as we saw in the lunar landing sites thread.
#moon #GLXP

Here is their site and the approximate location of Luna 9. The lander was to hop to a new location to cover the distance required by GLXP, but would probably not have been able to fly all the way to Lna 9 even if its location was known. SCSG withdrew from the competition on 24 May 2008 after the Team Summit, citing philosophical differences with the X Prize Foundation and funding difficulties. They were not alone...
#maps #moon #GLXP

... well, they were certainly not alone with the funding difficulties, but the X Prize rules, which evolved over the course of the competition, were onerous and the subject of much concern. For instance, licensing image or video rights could be a source of income for cash-strapped teams, but the X folk wanted to control almost everything and limited what could be done like that. Some teams considered dropping out before flying, to retain ownership of data.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 14

Spoiler - Moon Chronicle part 8 includes the material I'm pillaging for this thread.

We have seen the GLXP teams announced in February 2008. The next set of 4 teams was announced in May 2008. I don't know much about the first 2, though they probably did more than I know (any advice welcome).

The Malaysian team Advaeros (Advanced Aerospace Industries) did not progress very far and withdrew in 2010. The team described a spacecraft called Picard but few details were released.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 14

JURBAN (Juxtopia Urban Robotics Brilliant Application National) was led by Dr. Jayfus Doswell of the Juxtopia Group, an educational organization from Baltimore dedicated to helping disadvantaged youth. Their spacecraft would be called JOHLT, an acronym derived from the names of African, native American and Hispanic American astronauts. It would land at the Apollo 12 landing site, though other sites would be considered. I know nothing else about them. More substance tomorrow.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 15

Our next May 2008 GLXP team is Next Giant Leap, which planned a lander with hopping rather than roving capability, tentatively aimed at Surveyor 3 and Apollo 12. Initially they planned to land on an anniversary of the Apollo 12 landing, 19 November. Next Giant Leap concealed its identity at first by calling itself The Mystery Team, and its members were only announced in December 2008. They had backing from some big names including Draper Lab (who now have a CLPS mission) and MIT.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 15

The mission would include an upper stage impact which might provide an imaging target. A promotional video released in early 2010 showed the landing site a short distance northeast of Middle Crescent Crater, just north of the outer point of Apollo 12 EVA 1. The hopping vehicle was shown lifting off and flying near the LM descent stage to touch down again just east of Block Crater, a distance of about 750 m. It would image the LM as it passed by.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 15

The flypast of the LM matched NASA's guidelines for protection of heritage sites which were being put together around this period. In May 2012 Next Giant Leap was absorbed into Moon Express, another team with a hopping lander.

The mention of an upper stage impact is interesting. China's current plan for landing crews on the Moon has a braking rocket under the lander. It is discarded for the final descent (like NASA's Surveyors in the 1960s) and will make an interesting sight.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 16

Few of the GLXP teams had real science goals. Most were only looking to meet the competition goals or thinking of the entertainment value. Team STELLAR (the last May 2008 team) described a mission which combined aspects of GLXP and the proposed International Lunar Network. It would land at 10.925° S, 16.36° E on the rim of Descartes C within a nearside magnetic anomaly, and the rover would drive to the Apollo 16 site about 60 km further north. The lander's name was Stellar Eagle.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 16

This map shows the approximate rover path based on their description. Other sites were also considered by the team, including Luna 17 and Surveyor 1. The team was reorganized in 2010 under a new leader and planned to fly a cubesat to test their lunar cruise systems in 2011. By mid-2012 the team had been reconstituted again under a third leader and had a new landing site near Apollo 12. I am not aware of any further progress.

Our next few teams joined late in 2008.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 17

Two new GLXP teams were announced on 7 October 2008. Independence-X was a Malaysian team with a rover initially called Independence Lunar Rover-1 (ILR-1), and later Blizzard, and a lander named SQUALL (Scientific QUest Autonomous Lunar Lander). It rebranded itself IDXAerospace and eventually merged with another team called Synergy Moon, and a joint mission video in 2017 showed SQUALL landing in Mare Imbrium, southeast of Carlini D at about 32.6° N, 15.5° W later that year.
#maps #moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 17

You can see we are getting a lot of sites now - after we review all the teams I will post a map of all the GLXP sites. But now - you'll have to excuse me, I just spotted a typo in Chronicle part 8 so I will fix it and repost the file. As I get older I find my proofreading becomes less reliable.

Phil Stooke May 18

The second October 2008 GLXP team was Omega Envoy, from Florida. Their lander was OmEn-1, the rover was Sagan, a name chosen by a public vote. In 2010 they identified Apollo 12 as a target, and Apollo 11 was also possible. A payload planners guide in March 2013 described three missions. The GLXP mission would fly between April and June 2015, carrying a rover to the Apollo 12 site. I don't know what it would do except presumably view the LM and Surveyor 3.
#moon #GLXP

Phil Stooke May 18

One of Omega Envoy's payloads was to be a small rover from another team, Angelicum. They gave up trying to build a lander and would fly on the OmEn-1 lander, but would be deployed after the Sagan rover to win the GLXP 2nd prize.
#moon #GLXP