Thursday, March 28, 2024

Pre Launch Status (Oct 09)

October 25, 2009 by  
Filed under Performance Stats

launch newsCOM = Cross on the Moon

The moon continues to make International news and this month is no exception. India’s Chandrayaan-1 space craft confirmed the moon has water in its soil. Soon after India’s success, NASA’s LCROSS mission monitored residue from impacting part of its spacecraft into a southern, sunless crater to confirm a quantity of water. The Regolith Challenge this month awarded all of its $750K prize money to three teams. This was a clear demonstration that small robots can move respectable quantities of moon dirt (regolith) in a short period of time. The $30M Google Lunar X Challenge added another competitor in October: C-Base Open Moon from Berlin. Just slightly before at the end of September Team Selenokhod, the first Russian team joined the competition. And perhaps the most significant news, the U.S. Human Space Flight Plan Report was released a few days ago to reveal a consensus that believes private industry is ready to play a big role in moving mankind into Space. All these events support a reality that private enterprise is committed to commercial space operations.  Space X will perform its first launch test from Cape Canaveral this year and NASA’s replacement Shuttle vehicle component Ares-1-x will test launch from pad 39B Oct 27. Again, this is great news for COM because we will be negotiating passage to the moon. We are seeing an increase in donations and expect more awareness of our mission when we post our first electronic newsletter.

Inside COM, we held a Board meeting last week and accepted 4 important policies and recomitted ourselves to the existing  no-conflict of interest policy. All members of COM are unpaid volunteers.

Stay tuned to this website and tell your friends.

I look forward to updating you in November

M.N. Clark, President
Cross on the Moon

Comments are closed.