Blogs

There’s a buzz around the office as we’ve started looking for our Google Lunar X PRIZE official judges. While the end of the competition is still a couple of years away (could be earlier if we have earlier successful launches!), there is much to do. Every day we get questions from the Teams as they get further and further down the path of refining their missions and spacecraft design. For example, the rules say that you have to travel 500meters ‘in a deliberate manner’, so could that mean it is ok to travel out 250meters and then return to your lander?

Tons of cool new developments & info this week in the Google Lunar X PRIZE! Astrobotic showed off their cave-exploring robot; Stellar gave a look at their budget and the challenges of Australian aerospace; Euroluna announced a satellite launch with Indian rockets; Barcelona Moon gave a great inside tour of one of their major space partners; and Team Indus brought out the classical music for an awesome moon-landing animation.

This week's Moon race highlights! And it was one for the heat shields... Moon Express' thermal lead did a webcast; Part Time Scientists sweated out Axe Apollo; Barcelona Moon unveiled some firepower; NASAWatch set off some sparks; and Tim Pickens slapped rockets on a truck (among other things).

Last week, the European Commission in Brussels hosted the fifth annual conference on the European Union Space Policy. The EU’s space policy was first adopted in the spring of 2007 and aims to provide a common political framework to align the space activities of the European Space Agency and the twenty-nine member states of the European Union – no easy task and one that still provides some heated debate!