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[edit] The Challenge: Free Space Travel
c-base Open Moon Project will participate in the Google Lunar X Prize – a race to the moon. The task:
to send an unmanned rocket to the moon, land safely, cover 500 m with a vehicle, and send data back
to earth. Overall, the Google Lunar X Prize will award $30 million.
For 40 years, space belonged to a few states and space agencies. Now the age of private space flight
has come. We will prove that the community is able to realise own flights into space and to the moon.
Unlike most of the 21 participating teams, largely well-funded U.S. technology firms, we use the abilities
of the community – the same community that has created technologies such as free software, operating
systems or Wikipedia.
Open Moon provides the platform to confront the big technological challenges together. The Open
Moon solution will be a simple, pragmatic solution. It‘s not our goal to develop cutting-edge technologies,
but to prove that a moon landing can be achieved by simple means.
The preparations for winning the prize will take two years. During this period, we want to create
enthusiasm for free space travel. With a model similar to free software, this time there will not only be
bits and bytes, but also propulsion jets and landing systems. This is a new level of cooperation within
the global community.
[edit] Private Space Travel & Google Lunar X Prize
Private space travel began in Berlin. The Verein für Raumschiffahrt (association of space flight)
centered around rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth operated the world’s first rocket airport in Berlin Tegel.
Here, Wernher von Braun also met with this group. Later, he became famous as the father of the Saturn V
– the carrier rocket that was used in the Apollo mission in 1969 to bring the first Americans to the moon.
Meanwhile, the first space station spaceport is being built in the Mojave desert in California. Despite
enormous prices, tickets for space tourists have already sold out. Here as well, development will be
swift, since the age of private space travel has been here for a while.
The X Prize Foundation is an important initiator with repeated top-prize competitions to drive the
development and solving of big technological challenges. This is also why the Google Lunar X Prize was
started in 2007.
The first non-government organisation to land on the moon by December 31st, 2012, cover a range of
500m and send the first e-mail from the moon to the earth, will receive a check for $20 million.
This is not the first tender for a successful private flight into space. On October 4th, 2004 the world
learned that the threshold of 100 km flight altitude had been crossed. The Scaled Composites team and
their SpaceShipOne, funded by British billionaire Richard Branson, won the X Prize Foundation prize and
made history in the field of private space travel.
[edit] Technical Requirement
[edit] Stage 1 Rocket Launch
First of all we need to reach a low Earth orbit (LEO).
For this purpose we will use a commercial launch
vehicle.
[edit] Stage 2 Transfer to the Moon
The next step will be the transfer to the Moon. For
this purpose we need a spaceship that is capable to
carry a Moon lander and to perform the acceleration
maneuver in Earth orbit and the deceleration maneuver
for moon orbit injection. This spaceship cannot be
bought as is, instead we intend to modify a standard
satellite bus (as is produced by several space companies)
for our needs.
[edit] Stage 3 Descent to the Moon Surface
Orbiting the moon we need to descent to its
surface. This is done by the Moon Lander. There are
two alternative approaches: 1. Reduce velocity and
altitude down to an acceptable extent and then deflate
an airbag-like device to cushion the hard landing (the
Lunar approach). 2. Use thrusters all the time to perform
a soft landing (this is the more demanding Apollo
approach).
[edit] Stage 4 The Rover
Landed on the Moon we will release our Moon
rover, where it has to rove a distance of at least 500
m. All hardware has to ride out the harsh conditions of
moon flight: Impact percussions while landing and the
smooth penetrating moon dust. After deployment the
rover will navigate autarkic on an unknown surface.
c-rove carries two main payloads: a high definition
CCD camera and a transmitter for the Earth downlink.
Depending on the scenario chosen for Stage 4 the
Moon Lander could be used as a relay station. To get
back all data the transmitting unit has to carry out a
capacity of at least 10 GB. Prolect SETI@home has offered
their facilities to catch up the Mooncast.
[edit] Commoonities
To achieve our goal to win the Google Lunar X-Prize we indent to make use of existing technologies. Where it is necessary, we will develop our own technologies and hardware, like the rover. Therefore we subdivided into several Teams, building the Commoonity which focuses on the different competition´s challenges.
ALICE Propulsion Commoonity, Commoonity Commoonity, Open Moon Commoonity, Open Moon Design Commoonity, Open Moon GLXP Commoonity, Open Moon Proof of Concept Commoonity, Open Moon Robot Station Commoonity, Open Moon c-rove Commoonity, PicoNet 5G Internet Commoonity
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