credit NASA / caption: This hovering, lander test
The latest “low cost” Moon mission, the $80 million Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft, is to place an award for its propulsion system in May, which will be the second phase of a two phase process. The first phase is for a $50,000 propulsion preliminary design, the deadline for offers for which is 15 January
The team working on LADEE have also been working on a low cost lander with Google Lunar X prize team Odyssey Moon Ventures and has released video of hover tests, pictures of which you can see here
LADEE has also been the focus of a Wired article. You can follow LADEE’s progress via its Twitter page here
You can see Hyperbola’s previous coverage of LADEE here
Still, it looks remarkably like India’s Bhaskasa satellite, which was launched by the Soviet Union in June 1979, but who am I to make such an observation
