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 Given that the prize is no longer active, carrying a somewhat smaller logo is understandable since SpaceIL is no longer competing for the full $20 million Grand Prize.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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Congratulations ispace !

This week the Japanese space start-up ispace raised $90.2 million in funding to develop a lunar orbiter and a lunar lander, as their first steps towards building a transportation and lunar mining business.

ispace is framing its future roadmap as the Moon Valley project, which begins with the first orbiter and lander missions (M1 and M2) by 2020. After that the company will continue to develop an Earth-Moon transportation platform with 7 more missions (M3 to M9) exploring for water in the permanently shadowed areas at the Moon's poles as well as carrying customer payloads.

Beyond that, in missions M10 and thereafter, the company plans to build the industrial infrastructure on the Moon needed to support the mining of polar water and the further development of lunar resources.

The avid reader may notice that ispace had its early beginnings as part of the White Label Space Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) team, which later rebranded to become Hakuto. In the years that followed, Hakuto secured the sponsorship of some impressive commercial partners in Japan including Au, Suzuki, Japan Airlines (JAL), Zoff, IHI, Toray and Mitsukoshi. Later, Hakuto became one of the 5 GLXP teams to secure a launch contract and advance to the final round of that competition.

The company ispace was created by the steady and dedicated commitment of core members of the Hakuto team, under the leadership of Takeshi Hakamada (Hakamada-san).

In many ways Hakuto's, and later ispace's, commercial success has been built on the very principle that White Label Space set out to prove back in 2008, namely that a professional team of space engineers and enthusiasts could build an exciting and engaging lunar mission concept that would attract the attention of big commercial brands and the public at large, drawing in the financial resources to actually do the hard stuff and make such a complex and ambitious mission happen.

We wish Hakamada-san and the whole ispace and Hakuto team the very best on their unprecedented journey to the next planetary body and beyond!

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White Label Space Moves Full Operations to Japan

Media Contacts: For White Label Space Takeshi Hakamada Phone: +81-(0)80-3276-1330 takeshi.hakamada@whitelabelspace.com For X PRIZE Foundation Eric Desatnik Phone: 310.741.4892 eric@xprize.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

White Label Space Moves Full Operations to Japan to

Pursue $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE

Tokyo, Japan (January, 30 2013) - White Label Space, an international team competing in the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE, announced that it will now be run out of Japan. Previously, the team was operating out of both Japan and the Netherlands.  The team’s pivot to Japan is designed to maximize its chance of being on the winner’s podium. White Label Space is the only Google Lunar X PRIZE team currently active in Japan and has a unique network in that country’s media and space industry. The team will now focus its efforts on furthering the development of its Japanese moon rover, benefiting from the advice of its academic partner, the Space Robotics Laboratory at Tohoku University.

Takeshi Hakamada replaces Steve Allen as team leader. Mr Hakamada was a co-founder of the team’s Japan branch and has been manager for all White Label Space operations in Japan.

Former team leader Steve Allen comments “It's been a fantastic journey and a privilege to work with so many talented space enthusiasts. Since its establishment, the Japanese branch of the team has gone from strength to strength and now it’s clear that the future of the team lies in Japan. I would like to thank all of our friends and supporters who’ve brought us this far.”

Also stepping down from his role is Dr. Andrew Barton, who was the team’s Chairman. “With under three years left until the expiry of the prize, the focus is now shifting to those teams with access to the lunar surface. Unfortunately, our efforts to develop a lunar lander in Europe were unsuccessful but flying a rover as piggyback on somebody else’s lander is still a great chance to win second prize and will make a big difference by inspiring millions of people”, commented Dr. Barton.

The Japanese branch of the team was established in 2010 with support from Tohoku University’s professor Kazuya Yoshida, an internationally recognized expert in space robotics and rovers. In 2011, the branch announced its plans to the Japanese public with a press conference in Tokyo that attracted extensive coverage in the national media. Throughout 2012, the team continued its promotion work in Japan, running a series of successful educational and public outreach events including ‘The Rover Challenge’, a traveling hands-on learning opportunity for school children.

ABOUT WHITE LABEL SPACE

White Label Space is one of 23 teams around the world competing for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, the largest incentivized competition offered to date. White Label Space officially joined the Google Lunar X PRIZE in May 2009. The team’s name originates from the concept of a “White Label” product, which is a generic brand developed by one company and then sold to another brand. White Label Space sees the Google Lunar X PRIZE as the beginning of the next wave of space exploration where the common person can be engaged as a contributor and not just a spectator. White Label Space was initially founded the team in 2008 by a group that included former employees of the European Space Agency. Visit www.whitelabelspace.com for more information.

ABOUT GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE

The $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE is a global competition to challenge and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a privately-funded team must successfully place a robot on the Moon’s surface that explores at least 500 meters and transmits high definition video and images back to Earth. The first team to do so will claim a $20 million Grand Prize, while the second team will earn a $5 million Prize. Teams are also eligible to win a $1 million award for stimulating diversity in the field of space exploration and as much as $4 million in bonus prizes for accomplishing additional technical tasks such as moving ten times as far, surviving the frigid lunar night, or visiting the site of a previous lunar mission.  For more information, go to www.googlelunarxprize.org.

ABOUT X PRIZE FOUNDATION

Founded in 1995, the X PRIZE Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is the leading organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself.  The organization motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital for the benefit of humanity.  The X PRIZE Foundation conducts competitions in five Prize Groups: Education; Exploration; Energy & Environment; Global Development; and Life Sciences.  Active prizes include the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE, the $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Express Scripts, the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE, and the $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE.  For more information, go to www.xprize.org.  

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Crowd Funding Campaign Successful

White Label Space's Japan office has successfully run a crowd funding campaign to support the team's rover development. The crowd funding campaign was run on the Japanese website campfire, which is broadly equivalent sites in other countries such as kickstarter.

The campaign raised a total of 2.4 million yen (US$30,000) and offered its supporters goodies such as
photo albums, stickers, T-shirts, a mini-rover kit, an invitation to a rover test-driving event or naming rights on the prototype.

The preparations took around 2 months, from the first planning meetings until the project was published on the campfire website. The video below (in Japanese) was specially produced to promote the campaign. In it, Takeshi Hakamada describes the team's GLXP effort and also points out the special significance of the competition's long-term vision to Japan.





The campaign was online for a total of 60 days and in that time accumulated financial contributions from 284 supporters. Most of the money raised will go to the construction costs for the new prototype rover model.

The team is considering running even bigger and more ambitious campaigns in the future but the team hopes that the success of this campaign will already lead to new potential sponsors.

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Greatest Space Ads Top Ten

Space has been used as a venue for high-impact advertising for a long time.

Here's our Top Ten Greatest Space Ads:

• Part I - Heinekin on Mars
• Part II - Pizza Hut on the ISS
• Part III - Pepsi on MIR
• Part IV - Space Food Sticks
• Part V - Space Golf by Element 21
• Part VI - Martians with Hewlett Packard Printers
• Part VII - 7Up Spaceflight Competition
• Part VIII - Cosmofon's Signal Reaches Space
• Part IX - SONY and Space Tourism
• Part X - Johnnie Walker and Spacewalking

Greatest Space Ads - Telstra Provides Rocket Fuel for Smartphones

Australian telecommunications company Telstra has chosen an agile little rocket vehicle (complete with hover capability) as a mascot for the roll-out of its 4G network.

Rocket fuel is a well-known symbol representing speed and power. The rocket vehicle showing the shape of the letters "4G" zips around the screen of a TV ad (we will try to find online link to the video) and can also be seen in the background of the magazine ad below.

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Open Source Servo Driver for Rockets

Luke Weston from our partner Lunar Numbat has kicked off an interesting open source hardware project called OpenServoDrive. This is a high-power servo driver for a pair of DC brush motors and will be used in the throttling mechanism for the valves on our lunar lander's main engine.

 This open source hardware projects consists of just a single Printed Circuit Board (PCB) which is relatively compact, lightweight, inexpensive, and fully open source without any dependence on a closed commercial product. The PCB plugs directly into both DC motors, the 60V power supply, the two rotary encoders on the backs of the motors, the CAN, and a 12-24V power supply (supplied on the CAN loom) and provides the motor control. The new open hardware has equivalent functionality to the Rutex R2020 board when mated to a custom interface board previously designed and tested by Luke. The PCB layout is not finished yet but you can see the board's schematic in the project's github repository.

 The first use planned for the hardware is on the AUSROC2.5 sounding rocket, and it could also be used for any other applications where precise servo control of two large high power brushed motors is desirable, for example large CNC plotting, engraving etc. machines. Partnering with open source developers on projects such as this one is a key strategy of White Label Space to help reduce the costs of our GLXP mission, and to help make space more accessible for the everyday experimentalist and entrepreneur.

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Video: Electrical System Test for Rocket Prototype

We managed to snap this is a brief video last week while doing some testing of the electronics for our bi-propellant liquid rocket motor prototype.
The electronics are now fully operational and from now our efforts will focus on final integration of the plumbing and the thrust measurement system.

Austrian Space Forum Visit

On Thursday 27th October 2011 the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF) visited the White Label Space headquarters in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This video shows an informal presentation by White Label Space Chairman, Andrew Barton. He provides some information about the location of the headquarters, as well as a general status report of the GLXP team and its plans for the coming period. The OeWF is a partner of White Label Space, and the two organizations cooperate for field tests.

Fly Me Too The Moon

This video was taken at the jazz event produced by White Label Space Japan, where musicians played space related standard jazz numbers and WLS-J talked about our GLXP project.

In this video, Fly me to the Moon was played since this song is the first played song on the moon.

Rover Challenge Shibuya

Yumi Inaba from White Label Space Japan office presents this short video on the Rover Challenge event recently held at Shibuya in Tokyo.

Shibuya Rover Challenge: Day 1 Report

Report by Yumi Inaba from White Label Space Japan;

On Sep 1st WLS visited the Hachirabo Science Center for Children and met ten eager and curious kids for Day 1 of the Rover Challenge - Shibuya. The children at this Rover Challenge event were a bit older than those at the previous event held in Sendai.

We all had a lot of fun and learned about some space science and engineering. All the kids got excited and curious about what the rover can do and which part of the moon the rover is going to land. As soon as they came into the classroom they immediately found the prototype rover and crowded around it.

At the beginning of class WLS members answered questions from the kids and explained the challenge of the GLXP. After learning the challenges in going to the moon, the kids get to build their own kit rover. Some parts were a bit difficult, especially the gearbox, but everyone finished building their own rover. Most of them did not require any help.

The kids really liked their kit and could not stop playing even when the class came to an end. We hope they enjoyed playing with it at home as they took it home and that they look forward to the following class on the 8th.

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Testing of Propellant Flow Actuators

After some unavoidable delays things are back on track with the development of the bi-propellant rocket motor that will power the White Label Space GLXP moon lander. 

Here are some photos from last week's bench testing of the actuators that will be used to control the propellant flows during the static test.

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Moon Rover Challenge Comes to Shibuya

The next White Label Space Rover Challenge will take place tomorrow and next Saturday in the vibrant and chic Shibuya district of Tokyo, and will be broadcast live on Ustream and Twitter.

The aim of the Rover Challenge event is to motivate and inspire the next generation of space explorers through hands-on science and engineering activities. The Rover Challenge includes exciting activities that demonstrate to the audience the challenges of driving the White Label Space rover over the Moon's rough surface.

Participating in the event will be local elementary school children from grades four to six.

This event is the next in the series that started with the previous Rover Challenge held in Sendai this August.

Dates
 Day1: Sep 1st, Sat 14:00-17:00 (Japan Local Time)
 Day2: Sep 8th, Sat 14:00-17:00 (Japan Local Time)

Venue: Hachirabo Children's Science Center, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan

Contents
 Day1: Building a kit rover
 Day2: Driving the White Label Space rover

Broadcasting
 Ustream: http://ustre.am/NVSb
 Twitter: @wlsjapan

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Descent Trajectory Discussion

These photos are from the trajectory analysis presentation by Bart Hertog currently underway at the White Label Space HQ.

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Tethered Flight Test 1

A short duration hovering test hop was conducted.

Objectives for the test were:

1.  Test the ground, flight command and data logging systems. 
2.  Demonstrate that the vehicle has sufficient thrust to actually liftoff. 
3.  Record orientation data to see how the IMU coped with the flight

All objectives were successfully achieved.

The photo below shows the vehicle at the point of lift off. Video will be posted shortly.

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Any Day Now

This photo shows the lander prototype suspended from its support frame. Just a few minor steps are needed before its first hovering test! 

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