Paint Your Ad Message on the Moon with Shadows

This video by MoonPublicity.com shows a concept for displaying advertising messages on the Moon's surface with the imprints created by a rover with special wheels using the patented Shadow Shaping Technology.



The MoonPublicity.com business model is best summarised by this paragraph on one of the pages of their website:

"Let’s suppose it would cost a billion dollars to create and send a fleet of Shadow Shaping robots to the moon, the project would pay for itself in less than 3 years after completion. Over the next 50 years it would generate 18 billion dollars worth of advertising. And since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, the image could last for thousands of years."

I'm not sure how they will deal with all the craters, not to mention the lunar conservationists!

See also the interesting comments on the Gizmodo article about this project.

Study Predicts $1.5 Billion Market for Commercial Lunar Services over Next Decade

PRESS RELEASE: Thursday, July 16, 2009
Source: X Prize Foundation

Playa Vista, CA (July 16, 2009) – A study performed by the Futron Corporation, an aerospace consultancy based in Bethesda, MD, predicts that companies such as those competing for the Google Lunar X PRIZE will be able to address a market in excess of $1 billion over the course of the next decade. The results of the study resonate with the expectations of the X PRIZE Foundation, which conducts the $30 million competition that challenges space professionals and engineers from across the globe to build and launch privately funded spacecraft capable of exploring the lunar surface. The market projection demonstrates the breadth of commercial opportunities that companies are likely to pursue either during or after the conclusion of their Google Lunar X PRIZE missions.

The study, which involved a detailed examination of the 19 teams already registered in the competition, as well as a robust analysis of potential lines of business, identified six key market areas: hardware sales to the worldwide government sector, services provided to the government sector, products provided to the commercial sector, entertainment, sponsorship, and technology sales and licensing. Taken together, the study projects the value of these markets to be between $1 - $1.56 billion within the next decade. Additionally, some Google Lunar X PRIZE competitors have set their sights on additional market sectors that fell outside of the scope of the Futron report, which could result in an even higher total market size.

The breadth and the size of these projected markets are attributes of a new era of lunar exploration quite different from the Apollo era. “The glories of the first Moon race were accomplished with only two real developers and two real customers—the national space programs of the United States and of the Soviet Union,” said William Pomerantz, Senior Director of Space Prizes at the X PRIZE Foundation. “Now, we’re entering a new paradigm – Moon 2.0 – that features an enormous variety of innovators each trying to serve a wide range of customers. National space programs such as NASA’s will certainly benefit, but so will academia, the general public, and the economies of those nations where teams step up to meet the challenges of lunar exploration. That breadth of impact will make Moon 2.0 much more sustainable and longer lasting than the first era of lunar exploration”

"We examined a wide range of markets that teams could address, both those that exist today and those that could be enabled by low-cost commercial lunar exploration," said Jeff Foust, a senior analyst with the Futron Corporation. "If one or more teams are able to win this prize competition, they will be able to serve markets potentially far larger than the prize purse."

For more information about the Google Lunar X PRIZE and the teams currently registered in the competition, please visit http://www.googlelunarxprize.org. High resolution photographs, video and other team materials are available upon request.

ABOUT THE GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE
The $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE is an unprecedented international competition that challenges and inspires engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The $30 million prize purse is segmented into a $20 million Grand Prize, a $5 million Second Prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the Grand Prize, a team must successfully soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. The Grand Prize is $20 million until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15 million until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation. For more information about the Google Lunar X PRIZE, please visit www.googlelunarxprize.org.

ABOUT THE X PRIZE FOUNDATION
The X PRIZE Foundation is an educational nonprofit prize institute whose mission is to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. In 2004, the Foundation captured the world’s attention when the Burt Rutan-led team, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built and flew the world’s first private spaceship to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for suborbital spaceflight. The Foundation has since launched the $10 million Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE and the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE. The Foundation, with the support of its partner, BT Global Services, is creating prizes in Space and Ocean Exploration, Life Sciences, Energy and Environment, Education and Global Development. The Foundation is widely recognized as a leader in fostering innovation through competition. For more information, please visit www.xprize.org.

What is White Label Space

We have been preparing a Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) team since March of 2008. At first we didn't have a team name or even a vision for how we would approach the GLXP. At that time, we were united only by the common belief that the time had come for privately-funded space missions to the Moon and further destinations.

As we started work on our business plan, we realized that the GLXP is all about reaching out and engaging the general public so one of the first things we did was establish this White Label Space blog. Through this blog we have explored some of the commercial aspects of the GLXP including space advertising, our brand image, interesting news about space that impresses the everyday person (outside the space industry), recognition of our early partners, and even some speculation about how Star Trek would win the GLXP!

In parallel to the early blogging, we formed an engineering team to start developing the early concepts for our GLXP mission. So far we have progressed quite far in our preliminary design but we still have to do an enormous amount of work before we can see our GLXP mission blasting off towards the Moon.

In the coming weeks and months we will gradually introduce our team members and more details of our technical plans. Of course, we will have to keep some of the technical aspects confidential - this is a race after all!

From this blog post, the most important thing you should take away with you is the meaning of our team name. Our team leader Steve Allen, invented the "White Label Space" name during a brainstorming session on the 22'th of June 2008.

A "White Label Product" is a brandless (or generic) product provided ready for branding by another company. Some well known examples of white label products are supermarket goods, records, websites and electronics. Companies with a strong brand image use white label products in order to save the costs and risks of developing new products. In a similar way, White Label Space is a brandless Moon 2.0 space technology start-up, with the "product" being a complete space mission ready to win the GLXP.

Although the cost of access to space is decreasing, space missions are still very expensive and the most simple GLXP mission will have a cost in the many tens of millions of dollars. Our team of dedicated and passionate space engineers, together with our strong technical partners, will bridge the funding gap by developing the necessary technologies and designs in-house, and using the internet to promote our progress and test results.

When we are ready, we will sell our white label space mission to one or more of the biggest brands in the world, who will replace our White Label Space brand with their own brand/s, and together we will take part in humanity's next great step to a sustainable presence on Moon.

White Label Space Joins Google Lunar X PRIZE

Team White Label Space was formed back in early 2008 by a group of experienced space professionals inspired by the challenge of the Google Lunar X PRIZE. With a strong background in space engineering and knowledge of the costs involved, the group realized that there were numerous global companies that could finance its Google Lunar X PRIZE mission with less than 10% of their yearly advertising expenditure.
Like the early Apollo missions, the winning Google Lunar X PRIZE mission will reach billions of people. By reaching this audience, White Label Space will offer an unprecedented advertising opportunity and will create strong and enduring brand associations for international companies operating in industries such as technology, automotive, telecommunications, transportation and finance.
From its Global Headquarters in the Netherlands, White Label Space will continue to build strong partnerships with companies and organisations around the world, particularly those that are interested in stepping into the space market or expanding their existing market share. Making maximum use of web technologies, White Label Space will provide an integrated promotional platform that showcases the partners' capabilities and products. By cooperating in the development of the White Label Space Google Lunar X PRIZE mission, the partners will also develop new technologies and products that can be reused in future space missions.
By extensively using social media to engage the public at large, White Label Space will reach beyond the space-enthusiast community and inspire people from all walks of life to join its exiting journey of discovery and adventure.
Team Composition
The team is comprised of people from many nationalities, including England, Netherlands, Australia, United States, France, Japan, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Norway and Portugal. Another 40 or so collaborators and advisers support the core team
The founding members of Google Lunar X PRIZE Team White Label Space include members of the Lunar Explorers Society (LUNEX) and participants in the Euromoon 2000 project, a European Space Agency (ESA) plan for a lunar surface exploration.
LUNEX is an international space advocacy organization that aims to promote the exploration of the Moon for the benefit of humanity. LUNEX members believe that the Moon is the next and most important step in the human exploration of the solar system and are dedicated to help achieve this goal through furthering international cooperation, outreach activities and general enlightening of the public. In pursuing this aim LUNEX hopes to bring the benefits of the Moon to all people on Earth through a sustainable exploration process.
Euromoon 2000 was an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) in the 1990s that aimed to land a robotic craft on the rim of the Shackleton Crater at the Moon's south pole in the year 2000. The efforts to develop the Euromoon 2000 mission plan were led by the Dutch Astronaut Wubbo Ockels, who assembled a team of over 25 engineers and scientists from ESA and industry to make a preliminary mission assessment study, building upon some related studies that took place in the preceding years. ESA was not able to find the budget for the mission but the efforts and progress made at that time are relevant to any European team wishing to compete in the Google Lunar X PRIZE.
Approach
The White Label Space team's goal is to appeal to investors by assembling a strong international technical team capable of winning the Google Lunar X PRIZE. White Label Space sees the creation of strong partnerships as a key element of this vision. Partners will benefit by showcasing their technology, products and capabilities on the international stage. To build an effective team, White Label Space will focus on interoperability and will develop interchangeable and modular designs that will lead to new interface standards for low cost space missions. This open and collaborative approach is analogous to what the internet revolution has done for business and the shift away from closed proprietary standards to open ones, where anybody can contribute and benefit.
White Label Space recognizes the enormous possibilities of the internet to share knowledge and organize information, to realize international collaborative projects more ambitious than ever attempted before. White Label Space intends to use the latest such internet technologies and will continue to update and modernise its internet infrastructure, looking to emerging internet technologies such as cloud computing for use with distributed project collaboration.
Partners
White Label Space has a strong network of partners around the world that are helping to develop technologies and equipment for its Google Lunar X PRIZE mission.
See the full list of Partners HERE.
White Label Space is continually looking to form new partnerships with capable partners from all over the world and discussions are currently under way with three other potential partners.
White Label Space sees this as the beginning of an adventure that has far reaching consequences for all of humanity. For us the GLXP is the starting point of the next wave of space exploration where the common person can become a contributor and not just a spectator.

Crowd-Sourced Microblogging Space Mission

Yes, it looks like those amazingly inventive Japanese are up to it again...

For those who find that Twitter is just not quite cool enough, now a Japanese non-profit organisation called the Kansai Space Initiative (KSI) has set up space project that will allow microblogging via a space-based server in the form of its 50kg satellite called KaSpl-1, which is due for launch as a secondary payload in 2013. There will be an on-board camera pointing at a digital screen that can display emailed user messages while in orbit... useful hey?

The project will also feature a crowd-sourcing element in that anyone who is interested can pay 3,000 yen (US$33) to get their say in how the project is run. Presumably the launch costs will be paid by those contributions, meaning that about 3000 people will be needed to pay (calculation based on launch cost of $2000/kg times 50kg = $100,000).

How many twitter-holics will be interested financing this project?

(Sources: TechRadar.com article, and Dick's Rocket Dungeon)

Space Agencies are Brands Too

At first glance some people may find the idea absurd, but space agencies can in fact be viewed as brands with their own intrinsic commercial value. That is the finding by this recent Practicum Study by the Kogod School of Business.

How can a government-funded entity have useful brand value? Well, one only has to think back to the Space Race Version 1.0 (i.e. the race to land humans on the Moon) to see the resulting brand value for NASA, which is now a household name all around the world.

In fact, the Kogod study recommended that the "NASA" brand provides a unique "unexploited value to the American taxpayer". But how could that value be realized?

Some direct ways for NASA to capitalize on its brand value would be to sell the rights to show the famous "NASA" logo on products or to link the NASA brand to commerical brands in advertising campaigns. The revenues earned from the sale of such rights would then be available to NASA for use on new space projects (which might in turn lead to even higher brand value!).

But in the context of the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) there is an even more interesting idea.

Many other space agencies around the world currently have rather weak brands. To improve public awareness, those agencies could use technologies developed under private funding by GLXP teams to fast-track the development and execution of their government-funded missions. Don't forget, the ultimate customers of the space agencies are the tax-payers of the respective nation/s, and which tax-payer will vote for a government that wants to spend billions on a a space agency that they've never even heard of?

How much do you think a space agency like ESA or ISRO would like to have its logo (next to the national flag/s of course) on a rover driving across the surface of the Moon or Mars? Food for thought for those entrepreneurial types trying to put together a business plan for the GLXP.

Sneak Preview: Our New Office!

We can't tell you our names, we can't tell you our business plan, we can't tell you our mission plans for the Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) ...

But be informed - White Label Space is coming....

ITAR and the GLXP - USA vs Rest of the World

Like almost all space technology activities, the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) stands to be substantially affected by the the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) of the United States Government's Department of State.

For a good discussion of the ITAR situation, see this article in the Economist.

In short, ITAR is a major headache for space companies in the US and for organisations in other countries that want to cooperate with the US on space activities. Space agencies such as the European Space Agency (ESA) consider ITAR one of the main design drivers for their missions, treating it with equal importance as mass and cost. In fact, numerous projects and studies are now developed to be "ITAR-free".

Efforts are underway in the US to reduce the administrative burden of ITAR and to remove some components from the ITAR list but so long as the funding for the US civilian and military space agencies continues to dwarf those of other countries, some form of ITAR will probably remain.

ITAR has profound implications for international efforts in the GLXP. Essentially it will be impossible for GLXP teams outside the US to use systems developed by US companies. This includes all the challenging systems needed for lunar landers and rovers such as propulsion systems, communications, radiation hardened electronics, navigation and control. If you are in any doubt that there are dual-use systems suitable for the GLXP, see our recent post on the Standard Missile Kill Vehicle.

GLXP teams based in the US (where most of them are) should not assume that the systems they develop for GLXP will ever be sold to customers in other countries. This is an important limiting factor on the sales projections in their business plans.

Also, any non-US team in the GLXP will need to aquire such systems from other countries or develop it themselves. This is a profound challenge since certain key technologies are almost completely absent outside the US. When it comes to lunar landing for example, the Russians are the only other ones with flight proven hardware.

It looks like ITAR is really is driving the GLXP to a situation of "USA vs the Rest of the World"..

Buy your moon rocks here

Now just $7500 you can buy a gram of lunar regolith, returned from the Moon by Interorbital System... and you can do it all over the internet. See this page on the Interorbital site.

Now, it's certainly a good idea, but how are they going to do it? While the Soveit Union completed three lunar sample return missions back in the early seventies as part of the Luna Programme, one must agree that it is extremely difficult.

To collect samples on the Moon, launch a rocket back to Earth, re-enter the atmosphere and survive the landing. Even the Google Lunar X PRIZE mission to land on the Moon and drive a rover around is already far more challengining than anything achieved by privately funded space companies.

Good luck Interorbital but we suggest you don't offer a service guarantee ;)

Lost in space

Did you know that you could be buried in space?

It is now possible to send a small capsule of cremated ashes of the deceased on board a satellite.
Today 150 people have been "buried" in this manner including famous persons such as Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (space burried in 1997), James Doohan, Star Trek actor (more precisely Scotty) and Mercury/Gemini astronaut Gordon Cooper (both on-board the last Falcon 1).

The American company Celestis commercializes this service on satellites in collaboration with SpaceX Falcon 1 while NASA have used it as tribute to outstanding scientists such as Eugene Schoemaker (Schoemaker-Levy comet co-discoverer) space buried on the Moon with the Lunar Prospector orbiter and Clyde Tombaugh (Discoverer of Pluto) space buried on-board the Pluto probe New Horizons.












Two contenders of the GLXP have signed agreements with Celestis (ie. Odyssey Moon Limited and Astrobotic Technology). A launch date "as soon as 2010" has been announced by the service provider as well as details on mass and price ranging from $10,000 for 1 gram of Ashes (for 1 person) to $30,000 for 14 grams of Ashes (for 2 persons).
It is not yet clear how these payloads will be positioned on the spacecraft, however one could imagine that the capsules could be packed into groups and used as ballast mass (what an honor that would be!).
In any case, it might just be one of those simple ideas bringing good money to the projects!

Goverment Support for Future Lunar Missions

The recent post on the Space Prizes Blog makes an interesting point. Space agencies will probably need to show interest in using the lunar lander systems developed by GLXP teams otherwise investors will just not believe it is worth the effort developing lunar landers for a single mission.

Web Presence

Any GLXP business plan we can imagine will be fundamentally based around the team's website. Luckily our team includes many people with diverse backgrounds. In addition to the obvious space engineering & science types, we also have people experienced in web design, media, graphics and art.

We plan to implement our web presence with an incremental approach. As a first stage, during 2008 we used a Tumblr site to establish our initial web presence under the temporary name Thestor Cargo. Later we moved to this Blogger platform, which gives more features and has some very useful options for customization of the layout. In the future we will move to a more comprehensive tool such as Word Press for a fully featured website.

White Label Space is a brandless space technology start-up founded by a team of international space professionals competing in the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Together with our Partners we are creating the first ever "White Label" space mission - ready for the brand image of powerful sponsors with the vision and courage to create profound and enduring legacies by being part of the first privately funded effort to land on the moon. Every aspect of our GLXP mission, from the naming rights of our space vehicles to the suits worn in our clean rooms, is available for the messages of our sponsors.

Space exploration, and particularly lunar exploration, is on the verge of a new revolution of low cost ambitious missions. This revolution is fuelled by the frustration that humans haven't been to the moon in our lifetimes, and driven by the engine of the internet with all its possibilities for new media, communication and collaboration.

The majority of us work as space engineers, scientists and technologists. We know that the technology needed to go to the Moon is far less demanding than what exists in today's typical handheld electronic devices. The real challenge in the GLXP lies in linking humanity's natural urge to explore space with the financial forces that determine the efforts and energies expended in this world.

Our mission is to provide brandless space missions to anyone that has a viable business plan, taking the principles of Web 2.0 marketing & monetisation to the next level.

MORE About our GLXP Mission >>>

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