'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."

Golden Spike: Private Moon Travel Startup Launches Crowdfunding Campaign

An artist's illustration of a Golden Spike Company moon lander on the lunar surface.

CREDIT: Golden Spike Company

A private startup aiming to launch manned lunar expeditions has started a crowdfunding campaign to get the public involved.

The company, Golden Spike, aims to get its first mission off the ground by 2020.

To help achieve that goal, the startup's leaders are reaching out via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo in hopes of raising $240,000 ­— "a dollar for every mile on the way to the moon," said Golden Spike's president and CEO, planetary scientist Alan Stern.

"Ever since we launched the company, we've been getting emails and tweets and Facebook posts about, 'How can I help?'" Stern reported.

"It just seems like there's a hunger out there to participate in grand exploration."

Contributors during the 10-week campaign can secure rewards ranging from printed "thank you's" and subscriptions to Golden Spike's mailing list (for a $25 donation), to VIP trips to see the company's first moon launch (for a contribution of $50,000).

Other options include nominating names for the lunar test vehicles, and having your name flown to the moon during Golden Spike's first lunar landing mission.

Stern said the money raised would be used to help Golden Spike get off the ground. But moreover, he added, it's a way for people excited about the idea of private moon travel to get involved, and a way to raise awareness about the venture.

"We hope that this campaign and all the projects it enables will generate a degree of participation in space exploration that has never existed before," Gerry Griffin, former Apollo flight director and the chairman of Golden Spike's board of directors, said in a statement.



Golden Spike plans to use existing or already-in-development rockets and space capsules to transport crews to and from the moon.

The firm plans to build its own lunar lander, though, and has hired veteran aerospace firm Northrop Grumman, which built NASA's Apollo moon landers, to work on the design.

The missions will sell for around $1.5 billion and will be aimed at corporations, countries without their own space programs and even some wealthy individuals.

"I think people are really excited about the idea of sending human expeditions to the moon from countries all over the world," Stern said.

"It could be all different kinds of people, for all different kinds of purposes. It's a very different, forward concept."

To help keep costs down, Golden Spike plans to sell branding opportunities and advertising time during live broadcasts of missions.

"We plan to make these lunar expeditions television extravaganzas, like the Olympics," Stern said. "We'll sell the advertising time like they do with the Super Bowl."

To learn more about the company, visit Golden Spike's Indiegogo campaign page.

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.