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Language: en
in 2005 the call went out from NASA they
had extra space on an orbiter heading to
the moon and we're looking for proposals
for what to do with it the competition
was on an Ames Research Center was
determined to impress the judges with
their L cross mission designed to search
for water on the moon but it wouldn't be
easy to get a coveted hitchhiking spot
on the lunar orbiter when the call went
out for this competition there were some
constraints given one was the mask and
strength thousand kilograms but there is
also a cost constraint you could not
propose a mission that came in higher
than 80 million dollars which is pretty
inexpensive for lunar missions of course
it has to be very fast turnaround an
entire lunar mission in 26 months from
start to finish with the strict weight
limit and a tight budget how do you do
it the whole key with L crosses to use
what exists do you take things that are
available you glue them together you
attach them in as simple away as you can
you're not doing a bunch of custom
designs and development you are
leveraging everywhere you can that's a
really smart way to get the most out of
the money that you're given l cross
pinched pennies by using off-the-shelf
supplies and spare parts from other NASA
missions but what made L cross really
stand out was its unconventional use of
a part normally used to attach objects
to a rocket we joked it's a sewer pipe
right it's a big over design piece of
pipe and L crosses the first to come
along and say well wait a minute could I
maybe actually create a whole spacecraft
out of that and actually use those ports
for different functionalities of a
spacecraft
Andrews and his team even design L cross
to make use of what would otherwise
become space junk it will hurtle it's
empty launch rocket at the moon in order
to kick up lunar dust and analyze it for
water we are the first lunar recyclers
to actually make use of space junk for
scientific purpose with its ingenious
and relatively low cost approach l cross
is paving the way for smaller scale
missions that complement the big budget
projects for which NASA is famous if the
NASA portfolio were nothing but
infrequent very large missions that were
staged many years apart and cost a lot
of money in a lot of development time
and there was nothing else then we would
be slow and expensive o cross i think is
bringing up some of this small lower-end
opportunity and that's where the small
guys are able to come in look at that
technology take it apply it change the
culture a little bit manage the risk and
off you go