Student Contest Launches to Aid Private Manned Mission to Mars

An artist's illustration of the Inspiration Mars Foundation's spacecraft for a 2018 mission to Mars by a two-person crew. 

The private Mars mission would be a flyby trip around the Red Planet.

Credit: Inspiration Mars Foundation

A private manned Mars mission may get some help from students on its way to the launch pad in 2018.

A newly announced contest asks students to propose design concepts for the Inspiration Mars mission, a private effort that aims to launch two astronauts on a flyby of the Red Planet in January 2018.

"Inspiration Mars is looking for the most creative ideas from engineers all over the world," Dennis Tito, executive director of the nonprofit Inspiration Mars Foundation, said in a statement Friday (Aug. 16).

"Furthermore, we want to engage the explorers of tomorrow with a real and exciting mission, and demonstrate what a powerful force space exploration can be in inspiring young people to develop their talent," added Tito, a multimillionaire who in 2001 became the first space tourist when he paid his own way to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

"This contest will accomplish both of those objectives."



The competition, which is organized by the nonprofit Mars Society, challenges teams of university students from around the world to design a two-person 2018 Mars flyby mission as cheaply and safely as possible.

Boeing CST-100: Private Space vehicle - Video

Boeing says its first piloted orbital flight of the CST-100 is planned for 2016.

NASA, based on funding availability, is expecting to begin buying seats on commercial-operated flights to the space station starting a year later.

The space agency is Boeing's core customer for the CST-100, although the aerospace company has also partnered with the space tourism company Space Adventures and Bigelow, which plans to deploy its own commercial space station built using inflatable modules.

Regardless of the destination or mission, Boeing plans to launch the CST-100 atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) provided Atlas V rocket.

The reusable capsule is designed to return to Earth using parachutes and airbags for a soft touchdown on land.

If, in the unlikely scenario an emergency water landing is needed, the CST-100 can also float. Boeing, working with NASA and Department of Defense personnel tested water recovery techniques using a different mockup at Bigelow's Las Vegas facilities earlier this month.

'Pumpkin' Moonship for Private Manned Lunar Landings Passes Key Review

This preliminary sketch shows Northrop Grumman's proposed manned moon lander design for the Golden Spike Company, which includes a descent stage, surface habitat and minimalist ascent pod dubbed "Pumpkin."

CREDIT: Northrop Grumman

A private space exploration company's plans to build a novel moonship to return human explorers to the lunar surface has moved one step closer to reality.

Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman has completed a lunar lander feasiblity study for the Golden Spike Company, which aims to begin ferrying paying customers to the moon and back by 2020.

The study came up with a new design that consists of a descent stage with a surface habitat and a lightweight ascent vehicle dubbed "Pumpkin," all of which would fit inside a 16.5-foot-wide (5 meters) rocket fairing for launch.

"This concept has significant operability advantages for surface exploration since the surface habitat can be segmented to isolate lunar dust and provides more space for living and for selecting the most valuable lunar return samples," Northrop Grumman study lead Martin McLaughlin said in a statement.

"We affectionately call the minimalist ascent pod 'Pumpkin' because of its spherical shape and because it returns the crew to orbit after the surface exploration party," he added.

Golden Spike, which was named after the final spike pounded into the United States' First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, aims to send two-person crews to the moon and back by the end of the decade.

The company originally pegged ticket prices at $750 million per seat, but revenue from media rights and merchandising could end up cutting that by perhaps 30 percent, officials have said.

The company thinks its services will be attractive to a variety of research institutions, corporations and countries, particularly nations that lack big-time space programs.



Golden Spike officials were pleased with the results of the recently completed lander study, but the company is not locked into building Pumpkin or any of the other components at this point.

"It's revolutionary. We've got the approximate capability of an Apollo lander in roughly half the mass — a huge advantage in terms of the total mass of the system," Golden Spike president and CEO Alan Stern, a former NASA science chief stated.

"We have equal or more habitable volume and have likely solved the problem with too much dust in the cabin going up to orbit," Stern added.

"Pumpkin may not be what we ultimately end up with, but it is a huge forward step. No one's really looked at a lander like this. We are pretty excited about it."

Fly Me to the Moon! Golden Spike Private Space Tourism Company

The Golden Spike Company intends to be the first company planning to offer routine exploration expeditions to the surface of the Moon.

CREDIT: The Golden Spike Company

The new moon travel startup Golden Spike has chosen its first contractor to design private lunar lander vehicles: veteran aerospace firm Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman built the very first manned lunar landers back in the 1960s (when the company was called Grumman) for NASA's Apollo program.

The firm made the Eagle module that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface for the first manned moon landing in 1969.

Now the company will design a vehicle to help Golden Spike achieve its goal of establishing routine commercial transportation of people to the moon and back by the end of the decade.

"This is a significant step forward in our plans," Gerry Griffin, Golden Spike's board chairman, said in a statement. "Northrop Grumman brings Golden Spike a unique body of knowledge and skills as the only company to ever build a successful human-rated lunar lander, the Apollo Lunar Module."

The founding of Golden Spike (named after the final spike built into the First Transcontinental Railroad), was announced just last month, though the project has been secretly in the works for two and a half years.

Graphic: How Golden Spike's Moon Landing Plan Works]

The startup hopes to sell round-trip moon expeditions to foreign countries, research organizations and even some wealthy individuals. Company market studies suggest Golden Spike could sell and carry out 15 to 25 of these trips within 10 years, once it gets going. Each expedition will carry a price tag of roughly $1.5 billion, company officials have said.

To launch these journeys, Golden Spike officials say existing rockets and spacecraft already built or under development can be enlisted. The only major hardware element that must be designed and constructed from the ground up is the lunar lander.

Northrop Grumman will explore a variety of different lunar lander concepts, looking for the best combination of reliability, affordability, and operability, officials said.

"We're very proud to be working with Northrop Grumman, which has the most experience and successful performance record for human lunar lander designs in the world," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, Golden Spike's president and CEO.

Private, commercial space race: Bigelow and SpaceX

Private, commercial space race: Bigelow and SpaceX - SmartPlanet

With the launch of SpaceX’s much-delayed but successful Falcon 9 rocket last week, there’s been renewed attention given to private space efforts.

SpaceX and Bigelow are two of the most prominent private companies working in the field, and given the Obama administration’s encouragement of private space efforts, you might hear those two names as often as NASA.

The idea here is that private, commercial companies can be run more efficiently than NASA, which is a massive and expensive governmental organization. The Obama administration is banking on this, and is investing in companies like SpaceX.

SpaceX was founded in 2002, and is run by Elon Musk, probably best known for co-creating PayPal and Tesla Motors. SpaceX is perhaps the most prominent private, commercial aerospace company out there; the company has been contracted by NASA to provide lift to the International Space Station.

The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on Friday is singularly impressive, despite several delays and a few hiccups. Says Kit Eaton of Fast Company:

Despite several technical glitches (an uncommanded roll of the rocket’s second stage, and incomplete parachute deployment and resulting impact damage to the first stage) the dummy payload was pushed into almost precisely the required orbit–demonstrating that a small private corporation can now successfully rival the industrial-military complex in being able to loft satellites into space.

The Falcon 9 rocket might actually be used by Bigelow Aerospace for that company’s inflatable space stations (yes, you read that right).

Bigelow Aerospace Building the first Private Space Station

Bigelow Aerospace is pioneering use of expandable space modules. Grouping of modules into Earth orbiting facilities are to be offered for rent or lease to countries and corporate interests. Credit: Bigelow Aerospace

With two prototype modules for a commercial space station already circling the Earth, Bigelow Aerospace is gearing up for a full-scale assault on space.

For the upstart firm, it's about volume — and not entirely in the sense of quantity or number of items sold. The company's expandable module designs are designed to offer low-cost commercial volume in space — for rent or lease — not only to private sector interests, but also to national space agencies.

Entrepreneur Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999. Over the years, the space businessman has invested some $180 million in his vision, drawing from a bank account built on construction and real estate deals, along with money gleaned from his hotel chain, Budget Suites of America.

Entrepreneurial zeal

As "Mr. B" explains, space is no longer viewed as largely the exclusive domain of large governments and satellite telecommunications companies. Emerging as a key ingredient of the future is the rise of the private sector, hungry to spur a new business case for space. An element of that entrepreneurial zeal is the establishment of commercial space habitats and complexes.

UK RAF: Surplus Aircraft to be Leased out for Private Holiday Flights

The aircraft will be hired by commercial airlines and the RAF Roundel quickly painted over and replaced by commercial flagship colours for civilian use.

If the RAF need them back during a time of crisis they will be painted back again.

It is the first time that aircraft not needed by the military will be leased out to commercial airlines.

The idea is part of new measures to save the Ministry of Defence money.

Fourteen Airbus A330s are being bought by the company AirTanker and these will be leased by the Ministry of Defence.

The deal will cost the taxpayer an estimated £13bn over almost 30 years and is the world's biggest defence Private Finance Initiative.