[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

Am I completely out of it, or is there no GLXP thread on here? I couldn't find one. Anyway, things are moving on it, so I thought we ought to have one.

For the record, I just turned down my second invitation to join a team. I'm staying as an interested observer on this - for now, anyway.

There is a forum at the GLXP site as well as team info. There are a lot of people with half-baked ideas of how to go about it. The real professionals are not doing much on the forum, just working behind the scenes.

At LPSC two weeks ago, Bob Richards of Odyssey Moon invited people to propose instruments to carry on their rover - targeted to a pyroclastic deposit, probably Rima Bode or Sulpicius Gallus. And I see they have now signed an agreement to carry Celestis's lunar burials to the Moon. Richards will be here next week, and I'll be spending some time with him.

This whole thing is going to be interesting.

Phil

[djellison]

I remember discussing it - but it must have been elsewhere.

I'm really looking forward to the creativity that comes out of this. However, the Google cash isn't enough, imho, to do the mission in full. As a result, there needs to be some commercial return (not insignificant commercial return) and I don't know where that will come from or what it will mean for the science that may or may not get done.

With the Ansari X-Prize, there was a world of commercial sub-orbital lobs to tap into, with a lot of people prepared to pay a lot of money. I'm not sure there's money to be made in small scale lunar rovers ( unless ESA/NASA/JAXA start paying people to do them - and the spending of too much governmental money outside of the nations in question isn't going to go down too well ).

And - can anyone figure out a way to get to the surface with just a Falcon 1 sized LEO payload?

Doug