Gadgetory

welcome to the historic Kennedy Space Center where team moon express is testing a prototype version of their lunar lander it's all in pursuit of the 20 million dollar Google Lunar XPrize awarded to the first team to land on the moon cover 500 meters and send a high-definition video back to earth all the while moon Express wants to be that team we're doing our first pad test today so it's a very exciting day the vehicle is all integrated we have propulsion that came from a propulsion development facility in Huntsville Alabama our avionics and our design and our structures came from our headquarters and not do it now so Ames and we have our facilities here at the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA Kennedy where we've integrated the vehicle built it and now we're testing it is a version of our Lander that has some fidelity the flight systems it's not 100% fidelity our idea is that we gradually will reduce risk with ever increasingly complicated flight test articles and so this is our first one and we're doing it specifically to reduce this risk and hopefully win some of the groover watch prize money the point of the test is to show that the lunar lander can both take off and land again on the moon and that's important because Moon Express is taking a very different approach to that 500 meter window that I talked about the teams have to move 500 meters either above below or across the surface of the Moon how they do that is up to them and Moon Express has decided that rather than building a robot they'll simply take off move 500 meters and land again thus completing the mission objectives so we're flying a fuel tank we're using modern structures modern materials and exponential technologies that have D materialized a lot of the avionics down at a very very small thing so we have a small vehicle that once it's in Earth orbit it can make it all the way to the surface that would by itself my name is Eleanor crank here I've been expressed I am a GMT slash flight software engineer writing software for an application is going to go so far away I mean it starts off with a little unreal until you start making more and more progress and realizing like oh man we're going to have to actually let this thing go at some point once we get close to the surface of the moon we start wanting to use ground relative moon relative measurements in order to figure out where the spacecraft is so we'll start taking radar pings of the surface of the Moon and then again start using imagery to do feature matching and determine the velocity of the spacecraft with respect to the surface so we'll be testing the dynamics of the vehicle how the propulsion works and how the avionics works and controls the vehicle and behind me is our Mission Control Center we're conducting those tests today we're still waiting to hear back from the judges on whether or not moon Express did complete their objectives but it's another test in the bag and a long way to go before they get to the moon and hopefully go chasing after that twenty million dollar XPrize everyone do something good yeah we go I'm Tim Stevens frissina at covering the Google Lunar XPrize you