Here's a first "sneak peak" at an initial PerspectX rendering of the Next Giant Leap lunar explorer.

This vehicle has the unique capability of flying from location to location while exploring the lunar surface which will be vital for exploring difficult to reach areas such as crater depths, crystal mountains or lava tube caves.

.

Next Giant Leap announces the addition of PerspectX to their team.

The Moon 2.0 Simulator (see announcement from last week) has been updated to support ground stations for communications.

Main menu→View→Stations — allows you to enable / disable ground stations
Main menu→Options→Stations — allows you to choose between the available networks

When ground stations are enabled, green markers represent ground stations within range of the spacecraft and red markers represent ground stations out of range. You will also see a straight line connecting the spacecraft and the ground station when they are within range.

The updated package comes with a database of existing commercial and governmental ground station networks but you can easily add your own stations. The data file Stations.csv contains comma-separated values in plain text format that can be edited using a spreadsheet application or a simple text editor.

The video below shows an example simulation "Picorover to the Moon" with ground stations enabled.

You can download the new release from the Google Code page : moon-20_100120_0931-win32.zip.

ARCA completed the general launch procedures for the Helen 2 rocket, as the Mission 4 will be launched in April 2010.

Yesterday, in the team's first major event in Japan, two of the technical leaders in the White Label Space team presented their latest plans for the Google Lunar X PRIZE.


Professor Kazuya Yoshida, the lead engineer of the Rover and Dr Andrew Barton, lead engineer for the Lander, presented to a crowd of over 50 including many prominent members of Japan's space industry. Also sharing the podium was Misuzu Onuki, CEO of NewSpace Consultants and prolific space 2.0 author explained the benefits and challenges of private space exploration with a particular emphasis on increasing Japan's involvement in this exciting field.

Dr Peter Diamandis from the X PRIZE Foundation also joined the proceedings remotely by sending a video email welcoming Japanese involvement in the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

The event also served as a kick-off meeting for the Japanese branch of White Label Space with enthusiastic brainstorming continuing until the early hours of the morning.

White Label Space aims to harness the advertising budgets of some of the world's biggest brands to achieve its Google Lunar X PRIZE mission and the connection with Japan is very important since that country has many of the world's top technology firms and biggest advertisers. The team is planning to develop a "made in Japan" rover that will provide sponsors with a strong platform to reach out to the general public, sending a message of technological advancement and commercial leadership.

Interorbital Systems' CEO/Co Founder Randa Milliron discusses the company's plans for a private spaceport in the Kingdom of Tonga, its TubeSat program, and IOS' NEPTUNE 30 launch scheduled for December 2010.

Radio New Zealand 'Summer Reports' (located at 08:45)
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/summerreport/20100114

Radio Australia 'Pacific Beat'
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacbeat/stories/201001/s2791047.htm

Granting the real possibility of delivering a Solo, Deep Space Vehicle to LEO with a “Falcon-1” launch vehicle, the “Way Forward” is much simpler than might be assumed. The payload of the “Falcon-1e”, at 1000kg, is sufficient to carry a typical astronaut, with his/her life support equipment and a lightweight reentry system, not only to GEO altitude, but also around the Moon and back to Earth! The third stage propulsion can be produced using motors and propellant tanks Micro-Space already has in stock. Other entrepreneurs have also demonstrated adequate motors for “Trans Lunar Injection”, some using the storable fuels preferred. But the extra orbital angular momentum required to Rendezvous with a satellite in GEO makes getting there harder than a loop around the Moon. The return is also complicated, but Delta V for that leg can be reduced by passing around the Moon on the way back. Since, as with most everything in space, stage masses scale nearly linearly with Payload Mass, selecting a “compact astronaut” makes a GEO service mission feasible with the Falcon-1e.

Micro-Space and others have already demonstrated the lightweight life support equipment required. A number of adventurers have demonstrated comparable duration activities with similarly minimal “accommodations” and comparable risks, even without a multi million dollar $$$ bonus waiting at the end! The main technological barrier to launching tomorrow is the lack of a proven reentry system. Aerobraking into earth orbit, and rendezvous with a space station, is a possibility and can further reduce the vehicle mass flying above LEO, but that process has more risk and today would require coordination with space station owners who have shown no interest in cooperating!

Adequate reentry shield materials are easy to come by (the Chinese once used Oak wood successfully) but lab testing will be an unavoidable need. Entrepreneurs who have tried to use “National Labs” for tests have found that effort frustrating, very expensive and often unproductive. Entrepreneurial sources for appropriate testing are going to be necessary. Fortunately, such tests for reentry materials are not all that difficult to arrange – as I will detail next week – and could be offered by any entrepreneur who has produced a smooth running liquid fuel rocket motor of 200 to 500 pounds thrust, and has a good place to run static firing of that motor.

Team FREDNET is offering the Google Lunar X-Prize community a new software application called the Moon 2.0 Simulator. Joshua Tristancho and Juan Martinez have designed and programmed the application to simulate a Lunar Bus Trajectory from the Earth to the Moon with a diverse set of mission variables to support a high level of customization.

The application uses an OpenGL visualization that displays imagery from GoogleEarth to provide a high level of realism. Support is included for generating Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files. This XML-schema format expresses geographic positioning annotations that can be loaded and viewed in a other geospatial mapping applications that support KML (such as KDE Marble).

If you're interested in checking it out, it's available. Just download this zipfile to your Windows system, extract it, and run the "Moon" executable. The interface has a bit of a learning curve, but the release has a couple of good features that make it easy to use.

It's distributed with about a dozen "Preprogrammed Mission Simulations" which a user can load up and click "Play" (via the right-click context window). Click the image to the right to enlarge a screen capture taken from the included simulation of an Apollo launch.

Also, the release contains a Reference Manual (see Moon.pdf after you extract the files from the zipfile) which provides a detailed (yet concise) description of how to use Moon 2.0 Simulator. Andrés Petilo and Boone Adkins are creditted with maintaining and improving the information provided in the Moon 2.0 manual.

Happy Simulating!

Today, the Space Fellowship has published an interview with Team Prometheus about their current work, which includes building our Mark I lander prototype. You can read the interview on the Space Fellowship website: Team Prometheus - Upcoming Tests, The N-Prize and the GLXP.