Gadgetory

hi I'm Barney Pell co-founder vice chairman and chief technology officer for moon Express and tell you what we're doing today tonight we're actually celebrating as a Sarah our launch party where we're for the first time opening up and inviting in press and friends to come and see what we're up to um what we are up to is building an autonomous robotic lunar lander that will leave Earth launching on a commercial launch vehicle like the SpaceX Falcon 9 and then once it's out of Earth orbit our system will take over I'm cruise to the moon slow itself down you can see its own rockets and then lose all of the speed so that it goes Lance gently exactly on the moon we're going to land so including precision of a precision landing hazard avoidance and all those other kind of smarts on the system we have licensed and partnered with NASA so we have a huge head start in terms of Technology and that's how we can be a very small startup company just 13 people now and actually already have our own space qualify abal lunar lander that we're developing so what is the business of going to the moon so we're really in the early stages of the business that going to the moon I think that there will be a lot of the business will be resource development in the moon we may think of the moon as a dead dry rock but actually the moon is very very rich in resources the moon probably has more platinum than are in all the mining reserves of planet earth and that platinum is generally just on the surface of the earth because it's been brought by asteroids hitting the moon all the time over millions and billions of years so you can go out harvest that that platinum and then bring it back the another part of the business another resource is water water in addition to being useful for life support when we're traveling and living in space is also the key element of rocket fuel hydrogen and oxygen form hydrazine the key rocket fuel we use in space shuttle we now know that there is more water on the moon there's enough water on the moon to power 3 to our us-based shuttle launch every day for the next three thousand years okay so this is fast amount of resources and if you get that you can bring anything you want back from the moon actually for free once the infrastructure is built or you can bring that back to low-earth orbit and once that fuels are the North orbit then it changes the whole economics of space development because you can just launch only the payload you want to low-earth orbit and then use all the fuel from there collapse the economics so really this business starts now with being able to have a commercial development landing on the moon and bringing payload for our customers and ultimately we think that will lead over the next you know 10 to 20 years to a whole new commercial development business based around the myth and so tell us about the vehicle this is a quarter scale to the version of your Lander yeah this quarter scale version of our Lander you can see the these are the legs okay and it's really important to have legs so you can balance and not not fall and tip over this is showing various instruments I don't know if this one if you look under here you can see a tank at the bottom okay um that is showing the the main engine for the lander and that's the thing that is like as its thrusting out so the system is losing its feet as it goes down what's not shown on this is a whole bunch of little thrusters oh I guess if you come over here this is a model of 11 such thruster so the system would actually have a bunch of thrusters all over it and the thrusters are used for stabilizing the attitude so the thing doesn't spin out of control then you've got various other instruments and so on one thing we're going to be showing tonight is that we've built a little mini telescope that can go and land on the moon and start taking pictures of anything once it's there and that we have actually a customer who would like to build that telescope in larger scale and have us deliver it to the dark side of the moon or the far side of the moon that's the only place in the whole universe that doesn't actually see earth so it doesn't have any of the radio or light disturbances that come from