The Mission Overview

The entire Major Tom "system" is made up of three separate spacecrafts that work together in the transport of cargo to the Lunar surface in an efficient, continuously reusable cycle. These three spacecrafts are the VASIMR engine, the Cargo Capsule, and the Lunar Lander. Each Cargo Capsule reaches the Lunar surface by being ferried to Lunar orbit by VASIMR and then transported to the Lunar surface by the Luanr Lander. VASIMR and the Lunar Lander are continuously reused to transport subsequent Cargo Capsules. Here's a brief overview of each spacecraft:

VASIMR - VASIMR or Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, is a low thrust electric propulsion engine, that is currently being designed and tested by AdAstra Rocket Company. It provides continuous low thrust to gradually increase it and the Cargo Capsule's orbit around Earth until it is captured by the Moon. This means that the trip time is significant, but time is not as important a factor since these are unmanned missions. The low thrust also means we are using our fuel as efficiently as possible. We were fortunate enough to collaborate with a current employee of AdAstra who is also an alum of our degree program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cargo Capsule - The Cargo Capsule houses both the payload going to the Moon and chemical fuel for all three crafts. The fuel types include methane, oxygen, helium, and argon. This fuel is distributed to the two separate spacecrafts via docking mechanisms that incorporate fuel transfer. Payload is stored in Releasable Cargo Pallets (RCPs) that accommodate the cargo offloading once on the Lunar surface. Currently designed robotic arms for the Constellation Program have the ability to grasp each RCP, which there are two of for every Cargo Capsule, for transport on the Lunar surface. The Cargo capsule also features deployable landing gear based on Apollo-era Lunar landers.

Lunar Lander - The Lunar Lander's general responsibilities include taking the Cargo Capsule out of orbit around the Moon to the Lunar surface. It lacks any sort of landing gear since it is positioned on top of the Cargo Capsule while landing. In order to provide thrust, the Lunar Lander has two deployable trusses with a thruster on each. This not only allows thrust to be provided without damaging the Cargo Capsule, but also to allow stowing of the trusses during its launch from Earth. The descent and landing are automated by a precise guidance system incorporating various cameras and sensors. The Lunar Lander will relaunch without the Cargo Capsule, but only after it is refueled by liquid oxygen extracted from the Lunar surface.


Above you can see the three separate spacecrafts and then a visual overview of the mission divided into the "First Trip" where we launch everything and the "Main Cycle" where we only launch subsequent Cargo Capsules. LEO and LLO represent Low Earth Orbit and Low Lunar Orbit, respectively.

Stay tuned for more posts, especially as we approach our presentation at the PISCES Conference in Hilo, Hawaii, with our official departure date being Tuesday, Feb 9th!

Ground Control to Major Tom?

Many of you may want to ask "Who's this Major Tom guy?" or "Why would they name a lunar cargo transport system after a military officer?" Well, we would ask you "Have you ever heard of David Bowie?"

Major Tom was a valiant astronaut who was sent into space and soared "past one hundred thousand miles" according to the hit song Space Oddity from 1969 by who else but David Bowie, an innovative musician with numerous other hits. As for why we would name our transport system after this fictional character from the David Bowie universe, well, it was quite simple. If you think about all the satellite and spacecraft names out there, they all have some sort of "deep" meaning behind them or are some long acronym. We spent many hours trying to think of a name or acronym that fit perfectly and came to the conclusion that this task was harder than anything we had been working on for the design up to that point. Being the brilliant, time managing engineers that we are, we decided to scrap any name/acronym that had any real meaning and simply go with the single greatest space reference in popular culture...Major Tom

this is our favorite version of the music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o

The PISCES Lunar Outpost Design Competition

The major goal of the PISCES Lunar Outpost Student Design Competition is to allow the interaction between PISCES and students with the purpose of furthering the development of space exploration. The competition invites students to develop new and creative ideas relating to a lunar outpost in the following areas:

• overall habitat design (architecture)
• lunar resource utilization
  
• supporting subsystems
  
• issues of operations in space and on planetary surfaces
• analog field demonstrations of planetary surface exploration systems

The first report was due by July 15th and now, because of our success we are required to continue the development of our idea and report the results in a presentation and paper at the annual PISCES Conference and Analog Outpost Workshop. For us, that means we will have a very extraordinary opportunity to not only present our ideas, but meet and connect with people who have an extensive knowledge of various aspects of space exploration.

For more information you can check out their website here:
http://pisces.hilo.hawaii.edu/

PISCES Winners aka We're Going to Hawaii

Our "Major Tom: Lunar Cargo Transport" design has secured us 1st place in the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES) Student Design Competition. We've started this blog to keep anyone and everyone informed as we complete the work for our final presentation and paper for the 2009 PISCES Conference in Hawaii (November 2-6). Thanks to all that contributed and we hope to represent Wisconsin well, most likely in red and white Hawaiian shirts with the matching leis.

from PISCES:
"PISCES has selected the University of Madison, Wisconsin’s report “Major Tom: Lunar Cargo Transport” as the winner of this year’s PISCES Student Design Program. Competition was very stiff and we would liked to have selected several additional projects; however, budget limitations due to the current financial problems prevent us from doing so. I thank all of the teams who contributed to this project and their faculty advisors for putting the time and energy into the competition. We hope that you will continue to have an interest in PISCES and contribute to next year’s Student Design Competition.

With best regards to all,

Mike Duke and the PISCES Team"