Four NASA veterans and more are collaborating on the first decentralized space program
Humans living and working on the Moon have been a dream of explorers for generations. The key enabler of this new settlement will be to develop self-sustaining agriculture and industrialization. The tide now is shifting from thought experiments to serious business models. This advance has become evident at leading lunar development events such as the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) held this May in Los Angeles, or the Space Resources Roundtable, held in Golden, Colorado. These events originated as academic exercises but are becoming the venues where visionaries meet with architects, engineers, and scientists to devise practical plans for returning to the moon and staying there. …
Space Cooperative presented this CubeSat mission at the 2017 CubeSat Developers Workshop. As we outline below, we propose an open source project as part of our greater advocacy for global participation in space exploration. Our team is eager to prove itself with our first CubeSat mission, and we are searching for collaborators to exponentially grow our reach to secure enough finances for testing, production, launch, and operations. In doing so, we aim to expand the capabilities of the entire smallsat community.
Mission: COoperative Node NEtwork Command Test (CONNECT)
Current space segment design emphasizes two popular choices: a single spacecraft or a constellation of widely separated spacecraft. However, recent research on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology is leading to swarms of relatively tightly spaced, autonomous, and affordable UAVs. …
