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Crowd-Funded British lunar mission

peadar1987

By peadar1987
in Science & Spaceflight

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Streetwind

Streetwind

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Posted

I do not give it much in the way of a chance of success... some of the Google Lunar X-Prize teams have gone through rounds of crowdfunding asking for far less yet failed to meet the funding goals - and keep in mind that that's for a 2015 landing, not a 2024 one, and for projects that are already well past the "wishful planning" stage!

Crowdfunding space projects as a whole seems to be an affair that humanity doesn't seem to be ready for just yet. Almost every single one fails. In fact, I can remember only a single success story, and that was the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. It got fully funded, but unfortunately the project itself failed due to age-related failure of the spacecraft's propulsion system.

For what it's worth though, here's another ambitious project: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/northern-light-mission-to-mars

A crowdfunded Mars lander + rover combo, operated from Canada. Backers get to vote where it lands. There's already been a significant amount of work done, including prototype testing in vacuum chambers and the refurbishment of Canada's largest radiotelescope into a ground control station. The team is now looking for the funding required to hitch a ride on a future NASA Mars transfer. The campaign is set up as such that even if the funding goal is not met, the team will receive the money pledged up to that point anyway.

If nothing else, at least watch the video... the second speaker is hilarious :D

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heng

heng

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Posted

from the kickstarter page, timetable excerpts, heavily cropped, otherwise unchanged - selection of quotes may be biased by my personal opinion:

"2014: Kickstarter crowd-funding starts [...]"

"2015: [...] Early sales phase starts."

"[...]"

"2017: [...] establish overall mission cost, plan and timescale."

"2018: Main technology design and development starts."

"2019: Main sales and marketing campaign starts."

...

yeees, uh... I do calculate my participation probability to be within a small, but finite range, pretty close to one of the extremes of either 0 or 1.

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NERVAfan

NERVAfan

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Posted
Crowdfunding space projects as a whole seems to be an affair that humanity doesn't seem to be ready for just yet. Almost every single one fails. In fact, I can remember only a single success story, and that was the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. It got fully funded, but unfortunately the project itself failed due to age-related failure of the spacecraft's propulsion system.

There have been several cubesats Kickstarted and successfully launched (SkyCube, ArduSat, KickSat... though KickSat failed to deploy its contents due to a radiation issue).

And Planetary Resources raised $1.5 million in a Kickstarter for one of their Arkyd mini-space telescopes; that hasn't launched yet, but they're working on it (a testbed spacecraft actually got blown up in the recent Antares launch failure... but they're continuing with another.)

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Aningaaq

Aningaaq

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Posted
The last thing we want to be doing is littering space with our crap, literally.

I'm not sure you know what literally means. No one is planning on sending fecal matter to the moon. Regardless, this is what humans do. We explore places and leave crap behind. A famous man once said that archaeology is the science of rubbish. We leave a trail behind us and a lot can be learned from that trail. I'm all for it.

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Zilentification

Zilentification

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I'm all for the mission (and space exploration in general), but I wonder how much the total cost is going to be. I know very little when it comes to the commercial/financial side of rocket launches and it seems to me that 600,000 pounds is very small amount. So assuming I'm not wrong, where is the other money coming from? Are they really that reliant on Kickstarter?

Now I'm going to spend the night trying to think of cool Lunar Lander names on the off-chance I win the draw (assuming we get that far)

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Sky_walker

Sky_walker

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UK and space don't really go together for me, to be honest... And I really think crowdfunding is a bad way to go about funding such a huge project.

Agreed.

BTW: Funny how UK was quite a large an important player back in a day, but now it's just... Italian space exploration is more exciting and important than what UKSA does.

The kickstarter is looking a bit dubious; nearly half the money put in is in pledges of over £1,200, and average pledge per person is about twice the KS average.

Yes, it does. Especially considering rather underwhelming rewards (unless you flood them with pounds - all you're going to get are different newsletters, perhaps also some space on a magical CD that might or might not be placed in a hole - how much? Noone knows).

What do people think? Ingenious way to piggyback on the success of Rosetta? Cynical ploy? Another Mars One?!

Campaign authors say that timing it right after Philae is a pure coincidence. Do I believe them? Nope.

Edited by Sky_walker
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Nibb31

Nibb31

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Agreed.

BTW: Funny how UK was quite a large an important player back in a day, but now it's just... Italian space exploration is more exciting and important than what UKSA does.

Both UK and Italy are members of ESA. Britain puts money in and it flows back in proportion to the British space industry. If Britain wants to get more out of ESA, they should be putting more money into it.

The thing is, your government doesn't want to spend money on a space program, therefore the UK's contribution to ESA is symbolic and the UKSA is an empty shell of wishful thinking.

Edited by Nibb31
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KSK

KSK

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A Lunar mission you say? Ripping idea! Would have to be piloted by Dan of course.

More seriously, the UK is a pretty big player in space, but mostly in satellites and other behind the scenes stuff such as SpaceWire. (http://www.spacewire.esa.int/content/Home/HomeIntro.php). Crewed spaceflight, not so much.

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goldenpeach

goldenpeach

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I wonder why it's taking ten years? That's longer than it took Apollo to land a man on the moon.

Well, NASA was a governmental organism which receive(at that time) at kraken's load of cash, with thousands of persons behind them. They had far more engineers than you can imagine.

Compare this to the kickstarter: of course, they can have money, but if they want to do it as fast as NASA did for the mün(*) moon landing(more or less 7 years), they will need far more cash than you can possibly imagine.

(also, NASA really struggled to achieve Kennedy's objective)

* I SWEAR that I first wrote mün instead of moon... I play too much KSP I guess...

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NERVAfan

NERVAfan

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It does seem kind of a long time span... I don't think comparing it to Apollo really works, this is a (probably fairly small) unmanned spacecraft with modern computer technology, and it might even get a rideshare on a NASA mission or something.

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Geneborg

Geneborg

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"2014: Kickstarter crowd-funding starts [...]"

"2015: [...] Early sales phase starts."

"[...]"

"2017: [...] establish overall mission cost, plan and timescale."

"2018: Main technology design and development starts."

"2019: Main sales and marketing campaign starts."

Seems legit...not. They will start thinking about what they sell and how much it will cost 2 years after they...well start selling it. Somehow thats not how i learned to do business...

Kickstarter is becoming more of a scam every day, so much potential lost. Crowdfunding could be so powerful without all these snake-oil salesmen.

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