ProjectThoth

Mildly unrelated, but here's the first installment of stuff on the KSI lunar CubeSat.

Still in progress. Have a lot to do with the lunar CubeSat, too.

Nono - I meant to say that we're going to debut by the end of the decade.

Good question. I'd suggest applying to become part of the Interplanetary Citizen Science folks (the guys currently operating ISEE-3), and piggybacking off of whatever they're doing. I mean, a Phobos lander is technically citizen science, isn't it?

Less than a year? Launch is in 2022. Debut is in 2019+/-1. That's about three years, though that's erring on the side of caution. Regardless, I'm fairly confident that the financing plan I have laid out at this time is going to pay for the development costs. More on that here, though those figures assume raw profit values and really apply to my own program. I'm simply after using Sphinx as a means of aiding the Phobos CubeSat, not touting it as a part of the project.

There's a lot more information on Sphinx than I'm willing to let out into the open (corporate secrets, mostly, because it's a product). Second, that's pretty much what it is - it's designed to be a lander stage with possible upper stage applications. The payload mount is still under consideration. You aren't paying the cost of building a Sphinx. Sphinx is an (eventual) Astrobotic product (or at the very least, a joint product of Thoth and Astrobotic) - it exists independently of the Phobos lander. Additionally, a standard CubeSat launch (as a piggyback sat) is between 100k and 130k. $122,400 is right in the middle of that - development costs not factored in because Sphinx will be fully operational by 2022, and those costs will be offset by lunar payload deliveries. I don't think you'll have much issue raising that via crowdfunding, but I'd strongly suggest not going down that route as your main source of financing. It's good for capital, or buying the bits and bollards for the lander, but you're best off with a sponsorship of some kind (a la the Planetary Society) for the actual launch. First quarter of 2019, plus or minus a year. Really, it depends on how fast we get a prototype out into the real world, and that will come after the launch of Jebediah Kerman.

Yeah, the cost would be astronomical (ha! Puns!). Again, you're forgetting that Sphinx is going to be part of a payload service - about five are scheduled to fly before the end of the decade. Assuming a Falcon 9 launch (because it's cheaper), you're looking at roughly $122,400 per kilo (assuming a 500 kg payload for this service). That's assuming a break-even plan, however, so double that for a worst-case scenario. If you guys can afford to put a CubeSat in low Earth orbit, you guys can afford to send a CubeSat to Mars. Still, though, I'd recommend doing what I said earlier and start to organize all your information. Believe me, it makes things a lot easier.

Why so much delta-v? At this point, you could use Sphinx for the low orbit - Phobos transfer. Stick to chemical for the landing, mostly because it's reliable and doesn't require so much energy (a CubeSat ion thruster has thrust in the micronewtons at the trade-off of a huge electrical draw). Here's what I suggest, overall: Stick to chemical, make it as "dumb" (as in foolproof) as possible, and have a Mars-Phobos Lagrange 4 or 5 communications relay in your plans. Additionally, remember that you now have ~500 kilos of mass to work with for both the lander and relay sat, so there's now plenty of room for things like rocket harpoons and landing gear. I also advise, instead of simply talking about it, to start making diagrams and planning this out in as much detail as possible. Quarterly reports and volumes of them are your friend. This thread is about 120 pages long, and things are bound to get lost in the chaos. Assigning people to doing certain jobs (like two or three folks to review the landing system, two or three folks to study landing sites, and so on) is also a really good idea, and helps when it comes to organizing thoughts. This is also important for when the time comes to sell this idea to the rest of the KSP community/the world. Also, just to give us a deadline, let's assume a launch date of late July, 2022 and an arrival of April 22, 2023. While that might seem like a long time to go, it's only about 2,853 days away and counting according to this clock. I think we've got it in us to do something that, literally, nobody else has done before. The make-or-break factor is really organization and putting that first wobbly, semi-confident step forward into the unknown. (Sidenote: Unless we've already got a name, I vote we christen the lander Scott Manley).

Alright, I'm feeling better about the bumper landing system. Have any of you done any studies in regards to how we'd fit something like this into a CubeSat? EDIT: Didn't catch Kryten's comment - agreed on that. Feeling less better about the bumper now.

I'd feel better if we had landing thrusters, at the very least. Like a short burst of RCS to shove ourselves into Phobos. I'm more concerned with the bumper bouncing off into space than anything else.

Well, it'd be through Astrobotic, and not a one-off thing. It'd be out of your price range if you did it just for one mission. Bear in mind that Sphinx is going to be used a lot for various missions aside from just the Phobos launch. It's not the size of the antenna that's gonna be the problem; it's the power. CubeSats are tiny, and the amount of electricity you'd need to broadcast all the way back to Earth is way more than they can produce (the inverse square law isn't your friend at all). Also, without a relay, you'd go dark for about four hours at a time. The mass available in a Sphinx launch is enough for one of those, without a doubt. Clever, but I'd like to propose something else. A tether a winch, and a wardrobe - er, harpoon. Basically, the lander would fire a harpoon at Phobos (probably a small rocket-powered thing) at an altitude of about 20 meters, and then the CubeSat would winch itself towards the surface. Simple, no crazy maneuvers, no bouncing (which scares me, seeing as you could escape from Phobos with a bicycle) and probably "dumb" (as in simple) enough to work even without radio contact from Earth. Plus, a rocket-powered harpoon is rather Kerbal, don't ya think?

In response to some of your questions: It really depends on what kind of orbit Astrobotic's first mission is in. Lacus Mortis, the target landing zone, sits at a healthy latitude of 45.0 degrees North. Using a bit of extrapolation (and some rough estimates, because I don't know where my protractor is), it looks like their target orbit is going to be about 65 degrees. That's good news and bad news. Good news: We'll be able to photograph most of the poles from that inclination. (or at least, closer than anyone has been before). Bad news: Jebediah Kerman isn't going to last very long. See, there's these things called "mascons" in the Moon - areas where the gravitational pull of the Moon is slightly stronger - and they can perturb the orbits of low-altitude satellites to the point of crashing into the surface. The simple solution is a reboost every once in a while, but we might run out of propellant a lot faster that way. So this is a pretty big challenge to surmount, but I think we can do it. It's basically a revamped Apollo LM descent stage. Here's a whole quarterly report volume on the thing: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzQZ3LhGXAoTVEtRakQ4dFdPSzg/edit?pli=1. Table 4 is close to what the manned version of Sphinx will be, and Table 7 is what it will be with cargo - which is what will debut first. I'm seeing some concern about our Phobos lander project. Namely, in regards to communication - remember that Sphinx, as a Falcon Heavy upper stage, is able to carry about a half a metric tonne of payload to Mars orbit. Eagle eyed observers among you will note that the TMI capacity of FH is about ten metric tonnes, almost exactly the mass of just Sphinx alone. There's enough of a delta-v margin for Sphinx to complete the trans-Mars injection burn and park in a rendezvous orbit for Phobos. (The latter takes 1.41 km/s of delta-v, and we have about 5.4 km/s to work with). In fact, Sphinx alone could conduct the TMI burn and still make it to Phobos, with 1.8 km/s of delta-v to spare! That's a launch aboard a Falcon 9 right there, and not a Falcon Heavy. What I'm trying to say here is that we absolutely have enough mass for a communications relay to either be bolted to Sphinx, or as a small spacecraft orbiting Phobos. So don't worry about that so much. Anyway, tonight I'm going to sketch up some plans for a Phobos lander and run it by y'all. Hope you folks like it.

Hey y'all! So I'm the guy from Reddit, and this whole thing kind of blew up a lot faster than I expected. Whew. Today, I had a meeting with six or seven folks from /r/KSP about mission architecture and planning. Of the three lunar options considered, we're going for lunar orbit/surface photography - in other words, taking pictures of the Moon for publicity and also the benefit of commercial spaceflight. We'd be able to target certain sites of interest and create a decent-resolution map of them for use by other ventures, which is fantastic news for the private sector. Also, I'm considering names for our thing - I think ​Jebediah Kerman isn't half bad. I'm currently in pursuit of creating a lunar architecture based off of largely existing technology - hence my name, project Thoth - but I'd love to devote some time and effort into a Phobos landing. If you don't want to hitch a ride aboard Griffin, I have a far more powerful lunar cargo spacecraft in the works that I expect to sell to Astrobotic sometime in 2019. That thing (let's call it "Sphinx" for the time being, because it fits into the mythology theme that I was going for with Thoth) can land about two thousand CubeSats on the surface of the Moon on a good day. If you remove the landing gear and lower the payload capacity, it has enough delta-v to scoot into low Mars orbit. So, if you want to put about a tonne of cargo in LMO, I've got the means. There's also the issue - and I don't know what your solution is at this time - of communication over long distances. I want to bring this up because I might have a solution (again, if you haven't come up with one yourself). Remember the ISEE-3 folks? Yeah. I want to make this CubeSat project part of the Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission and use their infrastructure to transmit and receive data from the Moon. Might as well go the whole nine yards, because we're already talking about a ragtag team of people putting a satellite around the Moon. I think that we could get this half of KCCI in on this, too - which is why I'm talking about this here. Additionally, have you guys considered seeking funding from the Planetary Society for this idea? I think they'd want to lend some money for our efforts. Let's go break some new ground. How hard can rocket science be, anyway?

Besides running a manned lunar program (more of a lunar transportation system, really), I'm an avid fan of KSP. So, a while ago, I took it upon myself to try and demonstrate what it might look like in the real world (with the help of a few mods). This is what I got: (One minor gripe - I found out that the LEM descent engine in FASA doesn't have a gimbal, which probably led to the "pilot error" that I encountered during that simulation. In the real world, it did). I'm considering running this in RSS to see if it'll work with the real-world constraints, but I'm not sure if my computer can handle it (two whole cores, hooray) and/or if FASA and LazTek are compatible with it. I'd love some advice on that.