credit NASA / caption: This hovering, lander test
The latest "low cost" Moon mission, the $80 million Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft, is to place an award for its propulsion system in May, which will be the second phase of a two phase process. The first phase is for a $50,000 propulsion preliminary design, the deadline for offers for which is 15 January
The team working on LADEE have also been working on a low cost lander with Google Lunar X prize team Odyssey Moon Ventures and has released video of hover tests, pictures of which you can see here
LADEE has also been the focus of a Wired article. You can follow LADEE's progress via its Twitter page here
You can see Hyperbola's previous coverage of LADEE here
Still, it looks remarkably like India's Bhaskasa satellite, which was launched by the Soviet Union in June 1979, but who am I to make such an observation
on January 12, 2009 8:53 PM | Reply
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the NASA Ames center give an UNACCEPTABLE advantage to Odyssey Moon to WIN the """Google""" Lunar X Prize!
as explained here: http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/041odysseywins.html
I did not understand WHY all other GLXP teams STILL don't protest for the GIANT advantage Google and NASA are giving to Odyssey Moon!
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on January 13, 2009 9:11 PM | Reply
The NASA Ames lunar lander design is open to any team, US and otherwise (if ITAR concerns are addressed) and every effort is made to be fair. Any team that wants to draw from this design is able to.
There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. If you wanted restrict teams to using only non-NASA developed technologies, they would be using glue and sticks, because frankly nearly everything in common use derived from NASA (or similar agencies) at some point.