Many privately owned companies are involved in space travel today. At the same rate, many amateurs are building rockets and space balloons expressing their interest in space exploration and travel.
A team of amateur rocket engineers, Chris Larmour and Kristian von Bengtson, has started up Moonspike, a Lunar mission is intended to develop core technology capability that will allow more frequent and inexpensive access to space.
According to the Moonspike’s website:
“We believe that pushing the limits in any field of science and engineering generate more ideas, better opportunities and technology for the future. Some will say: “But we already went to the Moon”. Somebody did, but it wasn’t you or us, and it wasn’t recently. Major governments did – and left. Space access has become stagnant.”
The company’s goal is to to create a lunar rocket on a fairly low budget and encourage more people to engage in space exploration.
Moonspike will be building a rocket to tackle a traditional approach of moon exploration, launching it first into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and then accelerating toward the Moon.
Moonspike will follow the traditional approach of first launching into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), then after a few orbits accelerate towards the Moon.
During LEO, the spacecraft can transmit self-diagnostics and measured orbital parameters back to radio base stations on Earth so adjustments to the timing of the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) engine going toward the Moon can be calculated based on the data and then uploaded to the spacecraft.
Once completed,the entire vehicle will include the spacecraft, weighing just under 325lbs and the payload, a tiny spike of titanium designed to survive a hard landing with the moon consisting of Lunar penetrator technology.
The tiny spike referred to as the ‘Moonspike’ is a dart containing the protected data store that is designed to survive the journey.
If successful, Moonspike says that the spike will embed itself into the Lunar surface.
Moonspike is offering different funding options via Kickstarter for anyone interested in sending any digital information to the moon aboard its spacecraft.
For example, for $29 Moonspike will reserve 1MB of digital payload (in addition to some other giveaways).
The more you spend, the more digital space you’ll receive.
