14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with Golden Spike, a private venture, recently announced plans to construct and fly a private mission to the Moon by as early as 2020. In a bid to bring this effort closer to reality, the company has just joined forces with Honeybee Robotics, out of New York City, to start working on lunar rovers.
The planned lunar expeditions are meant to produce some scientific return as well, so potential instruments will be taken into account as the rovers are being designed. These machines will serve multiple purposes once they reach the Moon, including searching for water-ice and setting the stage for the arrival of settlers.
Golden Spike only announced its intentions to explore the Moon in December 2012, but its plans are already set in motion. With the help of Honeybee, the company gains more in-depth knowledge on the technical side of building exploration robots, Space reports.
While the main goal is to be able to launch two-person commercial flights to the Moon by 2020, the company is also interested in producing science, perhaps by renting instrument space on its rovers for the international scientific community.
In addition, the rovers will be used to collect lunar samples from a variety of locations, covering an area much wider than feasible to explore by a human crew. As the astronauts will prepare to depart the Moon, the rovers would return with the samples, so that they can be retrieved and returned to Earth.
“We're very proud to be working with Honeybee, which has tremendous experience and a record of successful performance in the development of flight systems for NASA,” said Alan Stern, the CEO and president of Golden Spike, last month.
“Honeybee brings a unique body of knowledge and skills to help us augment the capabilities of human exploration missions with advanced robotics,” added the chair of the lunar science advisory board at the company, researcher Clive Neal from the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.
“Their participation is a key step forward in helping Golden Spike change the paradigm of human space exploration, through the development of highly capable lunar exploration system architecture for customers around the world,” Neal went on to say.
Honeybee Robotics has a very rich history in designing spacecraft and robots for space exploration, having already worked with the US Department of Defense, as well as with the American space agency for putting together no less than three of its Mars rovers.