Remebering the origins of White Label Space in Japan

While scanning through my old messages I can across this photo from July 2008 when I first visited professor Kazuya Yoshida at his lab in Tohoku University to discuss partnering with our team to compete for the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

Following my visit he agreed to join White Label Space as the lead for our moon rover development.

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ispace Ready to Send HAKUTO-R Lander to the Moon

Japanese company ispace is ready to make history with its attempt to be the first private company to land a spacecraft on the Moon.

We wish our former GLXP team members the best of success in this heroic effort!

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XPRIZE to Award $1 Million for Robotic Lunar Landing After Prize is Over

The XPRIZE Foundation has announced that it will offer a $1 million “Moonshot Award” to former Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) competitor SpaceIL if its Beresheet spacecraft is able to successfully land on the lunar surface next month. 

This news sort of explains something interesting that was visible in SpaceIL's Earth selfie photo below. Can you see what it is?

Photo by Beresheet Lander in Earth Obit showing Logo Cluster (credit SpaceIL)

Yes, there is a small GLXP logo on the SpaceIL Beresheet spacecraft in bottom right corner of the logo cluster. 

In the rules for the GLXP the competitors were required to display a substantially-sized GLXP logo on their lunar spacecraft and transmit images of the logo back to Earth. Given that the prize is no longer active, carrying a somewhat smaller logo is understandable since SpaceIL is no longer competing for the full $20 million Grand Prize. Nevertheless, any logo space and mindshare on such an expensive mission is of substantial value and an organisation in SpaceIL's position would have many interested parties willing to pay substantial sums for sharing some of the moonlight limelight.

Aside from being a nice round number of impressive size, the $1 million dollars figure that XPRIZE Foundation is offering for this achievement has some interesting historical significance that is worth exploring:

• $1 million is a pretty typical price to pay for a major in-space advertising campaign, as can be seen from our Top Ten list of similar campaigns in the past
• It is also equal the Lander System Milestone Prize that three of the other former GLXP teams were awarded during the prize itself. At the time, the judging panel appointed by XPRIZE Foundation determined that SpaceIL's mission preparations were insufficiently advanced. 

Considering that Google already spent over $25 million on the GLXP, including operations and milestone prizes, spending another $1 million to fly a logo on SpaceIL's historic mission is actually quite a good deal to cement the Google Lunar XPRIZE's important role in kickstarting the era of private lunar exploration.

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SpaceIL Privately-Funded Lunar Lander On Way to Moon

Former Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) competitor, and Israeli nonprofit, SpaceIL has launched a (largely) privately funded spacecraft to land on the Moon. See Space.com article.

The total budget for the mission is estimated at US$95 million. 

Funding for the mission has predominantly been from private donations, most notably from Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn and American philanthropist Sheldon Adelson. The team has also attracted support from the Israeli Space Agency (ISA) and a number of aerospace companies and research institutions in Israel. The SpaceIL team was founded as a nonprofit organization wishing to promote scientific and technological education in Israel. 

The photo below shows their beautiful spacecraft named Beresheet.

The Beresheet Robotic Lunar Lander (credit SpaceIL)

After dozens of other fundraising approaches were attempted by the various GLXP competitors around the world, it is interesting and impressive to see SpaceIL succeed through their model which combines national prestige and an education-oriented nonprofit foundation.

The team's precise plans beyond this first mission are yet to be clearly articulated but the company that led the development and integration of their lander, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), has already announced a partnership with the German space company OHB System to offer the commercial delivery of payloads to the lunar surface for the European Space Agency (ESA). Under the agreement, IAI will handle integration of payloads onto the lander and be responsible for launch arrangements. OHB will be the prime contractor for those missions, managing work with ESA and payload developers.

Although the Beresheet mission comes too late to claim the Google Lunar XPRIZE prize money, it undoubtably represents a fantastic achievement of the prize's main goal, namely to stimulate new commercially-viable models for lunar exploration.

The Beresheet mission is sure to kick off a wave of similar small lunar surface missions with substantial commercial involvement in the coming years. We look forward to seeing other GLXP teams, and their spin-offs like our very own ispace, achieve lunar surface access in the not too distant future.

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New Promotional Video

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.

Google add Mars to the latest release of Google Earth

This is the result of a 3 year cooperation between the Silicon Valley's company with its NASA Ames neighbour aiming to bring the Martian landscape to the public.
Also, note that on this new release, you can Dive beneath the surface and Explore the ocean.




After Earth and the Stars, the now famous Google product "Google Earth" just released a new version with this time the opportunity to explore the Martian surface.

Have a look, explore it and let us know if like us you enjoyed it !

India Next to Land on Moon?

According to MoonDaily's AFP report India has announced that it will send a spacecraft to soft land on the Moon's surface by 2012.

India's Chandrayaan-1 mission currently orbiting the Moon is clearly providing them with some confidence that they can now proceed to the next level, a robotic lunar soft-landing. The proposed lander mission, Chandrayaan-2, would include a robotic probe able to "pick samples" for scientific study and transmit the science data back to Earth.

This announcement with a timeline compatible with the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) certainly lays down the gauntlet for the other major space agencies in the world that have not yet landed anything on the Moon but who claim to be preparing such missions, namely ESA, JAXA and CNSA. How will they respond?

Using an iPhone to Control a Spacecraft or Lunar Lander?

Can you use an iPhone to soft land a spacecraft of the Moon?

Taking a look at this experiment by Michael Koppelman, it may not be as far fetched as it seems.

Perhaps soon we will see Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) teams adopting this type of ultra low cost approach for their Moon missions..

iPhone Rocket Launch and Interview (from MobileOrchard.com) from Mobile Orchard on Vimeo.

See also our previous post: Can This SONY Camera Work on the Moon?

How far away is the Moon?

The average distance from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon is 384,403 km.

To put things in perspective, this great animation from the wikipedia Moon article shows a true scale diagram representing the relative sizes of the two bodies and the time it would take for a beam of light to pass between them - 1.255 seconds.

.. and you thought that Skype was frustrating when there is a communications delay.. imagine talking to a friend on the Moon where the minimum round trip for the information is about 2.5 seconds!

Armadillo Lander for GLXP?

Armadillo Aerospace won the $350,000 "Level 1"prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Spaceport America, New Mexico, last Friday. The vehicle launched vertically and moved sideways, hovered for over 90 seconds then returned to the starting point.

Armadillo tried the next day for the harder "Level 2" challenge, worth $1.65 million in which the rocket needed to fly for 180 seconds then maneuver to a precise landing on a crater-pocked and rock-laden look-alike of a lunar landscape, but failed shortly after ignition, falling on its side.

Congratulations Armadillo! It looks like you are on track to being a premier supplier for Google Lunar X PRIZE teams!

The Race is On!

Well it looks like 2 more teams have joined the GLXP race to the Moon.

They were unveiled at the AGI User Conference in Chicago.

The first team is Independence-X Aerospace, a Malaysian team, and the second is Omega Envoy, a team of students from the University of Central Florida. Interestingly enough Omega Envoy have decided to make their company not-for-profit with 'the common goal of advancing private and commercial space exploration.' An interesting move in a competition which aims to turn the Space industry in a fully competitve market. However, still quite a noble ambition, but one might wonoder if their motives might be more tax related and less "future of the human race" related.

If you were wondering who AGI were, they are the makers of Satellite Tool Kit (STK), quite possibly the most useful tool available for Space Mission Design. And the news that they'll be offering their software for *free* for GLXP teams is music to our ears.

Check out who all the current teams are here, but remember, there's more to come...

How Star Trek Would Win Google Lunar XPRIZE!

What would happen if the Star Trek team entered the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP)?

Approach: Teleport to the moon, take an HD camera ("off-the-shelf" of course, and put it in a hermetic metallic can see our previous post) and a spacesuit (Russian would be cheaper), take vidoes and photos, teleport a few times to other locations (total relative teleport distance across moon 500m), then teleport to the X PRIZE Foundation HQ (see below), deliver the data in a suitable memory card (type TBD). At the same time, give the details of your bank account to collect the prize money. Preferably your team is a non-profit assoication so you don't pay taxes!

View Larger Map

Landing Site: Go for the Heritage Bonus (no point waiting for a full lunar night)

Total cost breakdown: HD camera, memory card, spacesuit, hermetic housing for camera, travel insurance (TBD since we don't know what the risks of teleporting accidents except from the movie SpaceBalls where the guy gets his upper body and lower body reassembled facing in wrong directions). We estimate it would cost less than $1 million (excluding the costs of buying the DVD versions of all prior Star Trek episodes and movies to study their technologies).

Time taken: Not long (we don't know how fast the teleportation system works but you can assume at least light speed), time to film video, take pictures, prepare spacesuit, etc. Probably you could do everything in one day.

Other business opportunities: Advertise products, a few million per product (see our Top 10 Greatest Space Ads post).

Are there any trekkies who can tell us what we missed? Join our facebook group and let us know the full capabilities of GLXP Team Star Trek!

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....

Lost In Translation - Don't Rely on Babelfish

This is what happens to a company that has no quality control in their translations.

We at White Label Space are interested in helping to spread the word about the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) to other nations where English is not commonly understood. As you may have noticed from our Chinese and Japanese subtitled versions of the Moon 2.0 video, we have already found some translators willing to help out our team... so at least we don't have to rely on automatic web-based translation tool such as babelfish.

And by the way, the correct translation for the chinese writing in the picture is "Restaurant".

Can This SONY Camera Work on the Moon?

Sony has just released the first 24.6 megapixel camera called the DSLR-A900.

This is a good time to raise the question of using a conventional camara in a Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) mission. Cameras developed for the consumer market (here on Earth) can have costs that that are orders or magnitude lower than the equivalent space-qualified cameras.

Obviously the environment at the Moon has an environment with vacuum, radiation and temperature extremes far more severe than on Earth. However, all these issues could be easily overcome by putting a camera in a pressurized housing with temperature controls and metallic walls.

Modern cameras are clearly small and light enough to be flown in space. Mass could even be reduced by removing their components like the casing and the flash. There is an extra mass penalty due to the pressurized casing that needs to be considered but it would not be a show-stopper.

Here are the most relevant details of the DSLR-A900 (from Sony's Technical Specification Page):

• Weight: 850grams (approx.)
• Width: 156.3mm
• Height: 116.9mm
• Depth: 81.9mm
• Ouputs: Video (PAL or NTSC), HD/HDMI™ (1920x1080i 59.94/50Hz), USB 2.0
• Recording Media: Compact Flash I/II/MicroDrive, Memory Stick™
• Recording Format: JPEG, RAW, RAW+JPEG, 16:9 selectable
• Image Size: 6048 x 4032 pixels (JPEG) (24M)
• Max. Continous Frame Rate: 5fps (approx.)
• Image sensor type: CMOS
• Image sensor colour filter: R, G, B, Primary color

So the main question is, can such a camera be compatible with all the requirements of the GLXP?

Firstly, is the image quality sufficient? Does it provide enough image resolution, colour resolution, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Field Of View (FOV)?

Secondly, how about the video quality? It has enough pixels to meet the HD definition but is the frame rate high enough? Will the images with motion be too blurred?

And finally, what about the interface to the rest of the GLXP hardware? What communications protocol should be used? Most developed for space does not use USB for example.

If you have some thoughts on this, post them on our Google Group Open Forum.

Falcon 9 is GO for First (Test) Flight From The Cape

(Graphic Credit SpaceX, see www.spacex.com)

As announced today, Space X has received the USAF Operational Licence for Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Recent rumours suggested that the licence would not be granted due to safety issues and the proximity to other historical launch sites but once again it shows that rumours should not be listened to. In any case, it is now official. Space X will work to perform the first test flight of the newly developed Falcon 9 rocket before the end of this year.

This will mark a significant milestone on the GLXP competition as the forecasted performances make both the Falcon 9 and its evolution "Falcon 9 Heavy" both realistic candidates to launch attempts at the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP).

However, after 3 failures of Falcon 1, all attention is now focussed on the upcoming Falcon 1 launch which is clearly a critical one for SpaceX. Nobody knows what a fourth failure would mean to SpaceX but many are afraid that it would lead to the cancellation of future launch attempts.

It's Mystery, and we completely agree

If you have been following the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) developments during the past months, you probably heard that a new team joined the competition but exercised their right to conceal their identity. For the timebeing they are known just as "Mystery Team". According to GLXP rules they can remain anonymous until 20th of July 2009 (the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing) but they are also free to reveal themselves anytime before then. So far the only signficant clue we have to their identities is that they are based in the United States.

Few days ago, Discovery channel conducted an Instant Messaging (IM) interview with the team's leader (see the IM interview transcript on the discovery website).

We at White Label Space found this interview extremely interesting because the Mystery Team seems to have a set of views on private space exploration and the GLXP competition that is 90% in common with those of our members. Hopefully, soon we will be able to tell you soon what the 10% of difference are!

In the mean time, we recommend you to have a look at the above interview and let us know what you think about their views!

Oh, and by the way, what will they call the second and third Mystery Teams if they join?