Golden Spike announce Phase A for commercial lunar landing missions

[bananas]

Article and discussion at a spaceflight message board.

Article:

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/12/golden-spike-phase-a-commercial-lunar-landing-missions/

Golden Spike announce Phase A for commercial lunar landing missions
December 6th, 2012 by Chris Bergin

The Golden Spike Company team have revealed their initial work to create commercial lunar expeditions to the surface of the Moon. Led by a heavyweight board of directors, the company is currently in Phase A of their evaluations into the hardware that will enable crewed landings on the Moon as early as 2020.

The company, formed in 2010, has an impressive board of directors, led by Board Chair Gerry Griffin – a former Director of Johnson Space Center and Apollo Flight Director – and President/CEO Alan Stern, the well-known Planetary scientist, and former head of all NASA science missions.

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Via comments provided via interview to NASASpaceFlight.com by Golden Spike’s leadership ahead of the announcement, the initial drive behind setting up the company was conceived out of the failing Constellation Program (CxP) – the NASA roadmap built from the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) that aimed to send NASA astronauts on lunar surface sorties ahead of crewed missions to Mars.

By early 2010, Mr Stern had set up a study group, to evaluate a commercial approach to sending people to the moon, with the findings portraying that it was “clearly possible” that the private sector could enable crewed lunar missions. By the fall of 2010, Mr Stern and Mr Griffin – along with members of the study group and others – formed the Golden Spike Company to push their ambitions forward.

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Discussion:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=30549.0

Golden Spike announce Phase A for commercial lunar landing missions
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http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/12/golden-spike-phase-a-commercial-lunar-landing-missions/

This article is mainly constructed from phone interviews kindly accommodated by GS, with some quotes from the pressers.

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[phantom power]

1. we definitely need to get to the point where transport R&D starts amortizing

almost everything we do in space still has far too much of a pre-industrial aspect to it. Every time we do something there's large customized R&D costs associated. Like the days before standardized machined parts, and every piece of every tool was custom-worked by some craftsman.

Earthbound companies are (almost) never faced with R&D charges on developing the trucks, cars, planes, etc. It's taken for granted that we can just purchase such things at commoditized prices.

Hell, even the early European explorations to the Americas didn't have to actually invent new ship designs from scratch every time they planned a mission