White Label Space Japan Office is GO!

Tokyo, 20'th September 2010 - the White Label Space Japan Office made its official launch at the Tokyo Culture Club.

Key members of the Japan Office were present including Professor Kazuya Yoshida (pictured below), Takeshi Hakamada and Taro Asazuma. Video messages from Peter Diamandis and Andrew Barton were also played.


Guests of the event were also invited to try their hand at remotely writing Japanese characters on a simulated lunar surface (see below), inspired by the lunar zen garden concept developed by White Label Space team artist, Ayako Ono.


Japanese speakers can watch the UStream Video of the event (fast-forward to about 17:30 for the start of the presentations).

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WLS Japan Office - Open For Business

The White Label Space team is proud to announce the establishment of our Japanese office.

Led by Takeshi Hakamada, the WLS Japan office will be responsible for coordinating the team's commercial and technical activities in Japan.

Japanese speakers can follow the progress of the new office via the Japanese language blog;
http://whitelabelspacejapanoffice.blogspot.com/

Leo de Bolster

Leo de Bolster is the propulsion engineer for the White Label Space team. He is a developer of rocket motors with over thirty years of hands-on experience in rocket motor engineering and testing.

He has developed a number of his own rocket designs based on non-toxic propellants including bipropellants, hybrids and solids. His developments are made in close cooperation with the Dutch Federation for Rocket Research (NERO) of which he has been a member since 1962.

After his technical school education, Leo worked for seven years in various diciplines in the aircraft industry. He then studied at the college for marine engineering in Rotterdam, after which he spent a period of six years sailing onboard various vessels. After retiring from his sailing career he founded MEROC Consultancy, a company specialized in mechanical engineering and rocket motor design, which he still owns and operates today.

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Paper for IAC 2010

White Label Space team member, Juergen Schlutz, will present a paper at the upcoming International Astronautics Congress (IAC) 2010 in Prague. The paper is co-authored by a number of other team members and covers many technical and commercial aspects of the team's GLXP effort.

For those interested in attending the presentation, please follow the Session Details.

Below is the abstract.

FEASIBILITY STUDY AND DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOR THE WHITE LABEL SPACE GLXP MISSION

This paper presents a lunar surface mission concept developed by the White Label Space team, an official competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. The paper also presents a development roadmap for realizing the mission in a cost-effective and timely manner, as well as a long-term vision of the White Label Space team beyond the PRIZE. This work builds upon an earlier mission concept published by White Label Space members in December 2009, and provides the results of a quantitative study conducted during 2010. The quantitative study demonstrated the technical feasibility of the mission and the resulting system engineering budgets for the main driving parameters are reported. To maximize the appeal to potential sponsors and investors, the mission architecture and roadmap were designed to retire the key risks with minimum initial investments during the early stages of the mission's development. The team's long-term vision was developed to be synergistic with the latest international plans for planetary science and exploration, both public and private, thus providing an inspiration platform for potential sponsors.

Rover Prototype Design

A new student has joined the White Label Space team at the Tohoku University Space Robotics Lab in Japan. Jérémie Gaboriaud will be in charge of the CAD design of a prototype of the rover to be used in our mission for the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP).

The starting point for Jérémie's work will be the design configuration used for the recently completed project by Xavier Laurand on the rover's thermal design and analysis. From this starting point Jérémie will construct additional CAD models to examine different design options for the rover's various subsystems and equipment.

The rover prototype will initially be developed solely for operation on Earth. Its HD camera system, star tracker, and solar panels will provide new research opportunities for the Space Robotics Lab. Once the new test-bed is implemented, each subsystem will be assessed for space-flight readiness and suitability for operation in a lunar environment

Jérémie Gaboriaud is a French student currently studying mechanical engineering as part of a degree through apprenticeship at ICAM (Institut Catholique des Arts et Metiers) in Toulouse, France. His course requires him to undertake a half year internship in a foreign university and for this he chose to work at Tohoku Univeristy under the supervision of professor Kazuya Yoshida on the GLXP project.