Ed Belbruno's Update on the Lunar X Prize
Ed is the kind of guy you call when your own life is just a little drab and you need some inspiration. It's impossible to predict what he'll say. I alway ask the same question: "Ed, what in the world are you doing?" and I've never gotten the same answer twice. The last three responses have gone something like this:
"I'm painting a 40 foot canvas of the universe. It's really cool. I have an art barn now."
"I'm heading to a book signing party. Did you read the new book that I wrote inbetween teaching classes on celestial mathmatics?"
"Just saved a space craft..."
Here’s the latest correspondence from Ed– this time he’s working on the Lunar X Prize (no surprise):
Hello Talia,
FYI – I am involved in a really cool Google Lunar X-Prize project – to land a small rover on the Moon, and have it crawl a number of feet, then send back a video of the Earth. Our project is called Lunar Trans. My role is to design a really low cost trajectory to reach the Moon and land on it. This transfer to the Moon is actually based on one I designed in 1990 to rescue a Japanese lunar mission and get the spacecraft Hiten there in 1991. It turns out to reduce the cost substantially to land on the Moon since it reduces the landing speed. Although it takes three months, instead of the classical three days, it uses about 15% less fuel to land. This means that you can reduce the mass of the spacecraft substantially, and use, as a result, a smaller launch vehicle from the Earth. This is where you can really save a lot of money. So, instead of perhaps spending say, 150 million dollars, we think we can reduce the cost in half.
This last week from February 6-9, I attended a meeting of our team in Denver, Colorado, and went to a small satellite company, Microsat, to discuss our mission concept. It was exciting to get together with a number of other engineers to discuss this concept. We feel that we have a winning plan – and time will tell. The person who leads our team, Michael Joyce, has another job of building and selling full size replicas of the robot in the TV show Lost in Space. I think that is very cool.
Ed
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