A team of Penn State faculty, students, and alumni is making big progress on a bold goal: to land a spacecraft on the moon by 2015.
It was hard-drive-hum quiet at 2 a.m. A bleak, black January morning in 2008, three days behind sched-ule. Only four men remained in the control room, bent over a computer screen, awaiting a sign from the universe. Michael Paul, one of the four, had hoped it would’ve been different: a bright, brisk afternoon, the control room filled with dozens of engineers and technicians flurrying about, gripping each other’s palms, slapping one another on the back. But most of the control room staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab had opted for a good night’s sleep.
Over the previous three years, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft had traveled through billions of lonely miles of deep space on a trajectory toward Mercury. The team at Hopkins APL had designed and built the satellite. At a perfectly calculated moment in a perfectly calculated slice of space, Messenger would begin snapping precious images—one click, two clicks, quickly reaching thou-sands of snapshots in just hours—and wire them back to Earth, back to the Hopkins APL, to human eyes that would behold them for the very first time.
The fanfare that would have typically accompanied an event like this had petered out days before, after a couple of technical glitches forced NASA to bump the telemetry download of the images from a midday timeslot to 2 a.m., Jan. 14, 2008. Houston 1969 this was not. But the thrill of discovery wasn’t lost on the four who stayed up through the night to see it in real time.
The fanfare that would have typically accompanied an event like this had petered out days before, after a couple of technical glitches forced NASA to bump the teleme-try download of the images from a midday timeslot to 2 a.m., Jan. 14, 2008. Houston 1969 this was not. But the thrill of discovery wasn’t lost on the four who stayed up through the night to see it in real time.
“To see that first snapshot,” Paul recalls, “it was like, ‘Oh my God. Nobody has seen these craters, these mountains. In all of human history, nobody has ever seen the face of this planet. That sort of exploration, that sort of new knowledge that we can only get by sending a spacecraft somewhere in the solar system, got me totally hooked on building spacecraft and sending them out to be the eyes and ears where we can’t be the eyes and ears yet.”
That’s the kind of transformative moment Paul wants to bring to Penn State. In 2009, Paul left Hopkins to be-come a space systems engineer at Penn State’s Applied Research Lab, where he investigates how the university’s research could be applied to the space industry. Now he’s leading the Lunar Lion project, a team of roughly 40 Penn State students, faculty members, and alumni in Google’s Lunar XPRIZE challenge. Their goal: to land a mission-controlled spacecraft roughly three feet tall and five feet in diameter—about the size of a kitchen table—on the moon and transmit high-resolution video back to Earth by 2015.
The winner of Google’s Lunar XPRIZE challenge can earn up to $25 million, including incentives. If Penn State were to win, the prize money would go toward establish-ing a space institute at the university, says Steve Blake, director of development for research and the Graduate School. “But it’s beyond just the prize,” he says. “The ef-fort toward it could spawn a space institute anyway.”
The Lunar Lion team is the only strictly university-led group among 23 teams worldwide that are participating in the Lunar XPRIZE. Ten original teams have already dropped out or consolidated. Which means Penn State students—and the university at large—are now bona fide contenders in the budding new breed of private space explorers.
Only two entities have ever landed a spacecraft on the moon—the United States and Russia. If Penn State’s lu-nar lander successfully touches down in 2015, its payload can have a big payoff.
‘Oh my God. Nobody has seen these craters, these mountains. In all of human history, nobody has ever seen the face of this planet. That sort of exploration, that sort of new knowledge that we can only get by sending a spacecraft somewhere in the solar system, got me totally hooked on building spacecraft and sending them out to be the eyes and ears where we can’t be the eyes and ears yet.”
THE IDEA TO enter the competition was sparked at a 2010 conference in New York City, when Michael Paul met Greg Maryniak, a heavyweight in the aerospace industry who also serves on the board of trustees for the XPRIZE Foundation. Paul discussed his work at ARL with Maryniak, who encouraged him to enter the competition. Paul quickly saw an opportunity. Everyone up the university’s chain of command saw one, too—within three months of first speaking with Maryniak, Paul received approval from the administration and entered his team into the competition.
The business of space is no longer solely one of nations and big government agencies. Over the past decade, a bevy of smaller private startups has taken over the aero-space industry where NASA and its now-defunct space shuttle program have left off. Will Pomerantz, who for-merly oversaw the Lunar XPRIZE and is now vice presi-dent of special projects at Virgin Galactic (the private space-travel company founded by British tycoon Richard Branson) puts it like this: “A lot of the jobs that used to be NASA’s exclusively are now being passed along to private industry, with NASA as a customer.” The transformation is so stark that people in the industry have a name for it: “New Space.”
“Space used to be something that other people did, that NASA did,” says Michael Policelli ’11 EMS, Lunar Lion’s chief technologist. Policelli was a materials science undergrad working at ARL when he joined the project, shortly after it started. After graduation, he turned down an offer to make $61,000 at a Chicago steel mill to stay with Lunar Lion and pursue his master’s in aerospace engineering. “I made a lot less as a grad assistant,” he says with a chuckle. “But I realized that my heart was in space.” Now he’s Paul’s right hand, overseeing all hands-on aspects of the project’s design and development.
It’s not hard to see the allure. With entrepreneurs like Amazon pioneer Jeff Bezos and PayPal cofounder Elon Musk helping to lead the charge, New Space beckons young, wide-eyed space-lovers. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of making space travel afford-able for average people; Musk launched his space travel company, SpaceX, two years later, and just last year, its Dragon spacecraft became the first privately funded space company to transport a cargo load (without crew) to the International Space Station (it did it twice). The company aims to send its first manned mission to the space station in 2015—the same year Google Lunar XPRIZE competitors will be launching their moon missions.
Among universities, Caltech, which has managed NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab since the 1930s, has been the dominant force in U.S. space travel. But New Space is so new that no university has yet risen to lead the private space industry.
Penn State has been involved in space exploration for half a century or more. From as far back as the 1950s, its electrical engineering department has studied Earth’s ionosphere and its effects on radio frequencies. In the 1970s and ’80s, astronaut Paul Weitz ’54 Eng flew into space twice—in May 1973 as pilot of a mission to the orbital space station Skylab 2, and in April 1983 as space-craft commander on the space shuttle Challenger’s first mission. Also in 1983, Air Force colonel Guion Bluford ’64 Eng took his first of four flights aboard Challenger, becoming the first African-American to travel to space. Penn State grads Robert Cenker ’70, ’73 MS Eng and Jim Pawelczyk ’85 MS IDF have also flown in space; Heather Rarick ’87 Eng has been a flight director at Johnson Space Center; and Bobby Braun ’87 Eng has been a leader in Mars exploration at both NASA and Georgia Tech—to name just a few Penn Staters in the space biz.
Since 2004, Penn State has operated NASA’s Swift Satellite, which orbits Earth and tracks gamma-ray bursts from supernovas in distant galaxies. And since 1989, the university has been home to NASA’s Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. And that’s not to mention the university’s prowess in the related field of astronomy/astrophysics.
And now there’s Lunar Lion. “Even in just pursuing this prize,” Paul says, “we position ourselves to be the university that the world looks to for the future of space exploration.”
Already, the project has resulted in a partnership with NASA’s Johnson Space Center; NASA has provided bio-propellant rockets for Penn State students to test at a site near the University Park Airport.
Paul likens it to Penn State’s rich history of contribut-ing to the commercial agriculture industry. “The question that I’m posing with this entire effort is this: Space sys-tems development requires excellence in materials sci-ence, robotic development, propulsion, control systems, electronics—all disciplines that are areas of excellence at Penn State. So why can’t we bring them together at the university to serve the space industry, as well?”
ON EARTH, DOWN the street from Rec Hall, a wide room with no windows is tucked into the first floor of Steidle Building, protecting Paul, Policelli, and a dozen Penn State students from a frigid February Saturday afternoon. Models of spacecraft built from K’NEX toys await an imaginary launch countdown on the central table, and small paper cutouts of Earth and the moon hang at the back of the room with nothing between them but a peculiarly long stretch of wall.
“It’s to scale,” says a young man with tousled hair. “The distance. From Earth to the moon.” Ben Garelick is an aerospace engineering major from New York City who has been obsessed with space since childhood. He came to Penn State because of its strong engineering reputa-tion, learned of Lunar Lion shortly after arriving on cam-pus in Fall 2012, and immediately signed on.
Now he, like all of Lunar Lion’s core members, devotes the majority of his waking hours outside of classwork to addressing technical problems or funding issues for Lunar Lion. Which explains why a dozen team members are gathered on a Saturday at the project’s student lab in Steidle, just a short walk from Lunar Lion HQ in the Ap-plied Research Lab.
The students design scrupulously detailed computer models of spacecraft parts that could function in space. They call rocket builders in Moscow and fumble their way through Russian for advice on launch vehicles. They debate what’s cooler—comets or asteroids. But they’re not all aerospace engineering majors.
The ones who are, including Garelick, work with Policelli to tweak the spacecraft’s design, including the de-tails of its landing and communications components. But the project also involves Earth and Mineral Sciences majors who took NASA’s most recent data from the moon and used it to create a 3-D map of potential Lunar Lion landing sites. Electrical engineering students help to suss out the craft’s solar-powered electrical systems for communications and video footage. A communications major, Natasha Pelak, is documenting the project as it unfolds, posting photo essays and video interviews with team members on the Lunar Lion website (lunarlion .psu.edu) and YouTube channel. And College of Education students are doing community outreach in State College elementary schools, using Lunar Lion as an example of what the future of space exploration could look like. Even a State College High School student, Sean Colby, is involved: He created a computer-animated video of the mission details.
If students want to pitch in, Paul will find a place for them, no matter what their background. “Everybody,” he says, “can bring their own personal power to contribute to this.”
Especially important are four MBA candidates. While Penn State covered half of the $50,000 entry fee into the Lunar XPRIZE challenge, the university isn’t funding the entire project, which means the operating budget to cover the spacecraft’s production and launch comes from two sources: donors and investors.
“It’s not that the engineering is easy, but we’re not worried about whether the engineering can be done,” says Dave Lenze ’87 Eng, ’91 MBA Bus, director of the Smeal College of Business’s Applied Professional Experience program, or APEX. “Whether we put Lunar Lion on the moon will come down to whether we can put together the right group of investors to give the team the resources they need to make it happen.”
That’s where the MBA candidates come in. They developed a business plan that establishes a separate business entity for Lunar Lion—a for-profit “C corporation” in which multiple investors would buy shares outright or earn them through goods or services that help spur the project along. The intellectual property generated by the project’s research could, in turn, be licensed or sold in order to produce a financial return for the investors. It’s a model based on other innovative companies’ methods for funding research to change the landscape of space exploration. At press time, Paul was in talks with five or six significant investors, but no contracts were officially confirmed.
If students want to pitch in, Paul will find a place for them, no matter what their background. “Everybody,” he says, “can bring their own personal power to contribute to this.”
The APEX team also developed Paul’s pitch to investors—an art form that didn’t come naturally to an en-gineer who’s more familiar with distant celestial bodies than elevator speeches.
“I’ve learned to throw a switch in my head,” Paul says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to speak to a venture capital firm, so all my language needs to be in terms of profit.’ When I speak to students, I throw on the student switch, and all my language is about the benefits and value Lunar Lion has for students.”
One of the most important benefits is real-world, practical experience—like the recent contract Lunar Lion se-cured with the Johnson Space Center to test cryogenic liquid rocket engines in exchange for test data. Pomerantz, the Virgin Galactic vice president, says that kind of experience is vital: “This project is going to make any student who is affiliated with it infinitely more hirable.”
Maria Matthews ’12 PhD Sci is a prime example. A sci-fi lover who grew up on Star Trek, Matthews was three months away from defending her dissertation in physics when she started with Lunar Lion. She was hop-ing to find a career somewhere in the aerospace industry, and her adviser put her in touch with Paul. She promptly joined his team. “It was like, ‘Wow, this is what I want to do,’” she says. Her physics coursework didn’t provide her with any direct aerospace training, but her Lunar Lion experience got her hired as a junior systems engineer at Zero Point Frontiers, an aerospace technology startup in Huntsville, Ala., where she designs rocket parts and helps with general business development.
If Lunar Lion offers improved aerospace training for students exiting the university, a full-fledged space insti-tute at Penn State could also offer an attractive incentive for students entering college. “It’s really my intention that Penn State becomes known for being the place you go for space,” says Policelli, who landed an internship at Musk’s SpaceX last year, two years after turning down that job offer from a steel mill. “My hope is that if you want to be involved in space projects, if you want to do hands-on research—even as an undergraduate—then Penn State becomes where you go to help build rockets, help build satellites, land on foreign bodies, and complete missions.”
Lion vehicle will be on its way out of Earth’s atmosphere. The team is currently testing various versions of descent and landing engines; a prototype of the craft will be con-structed for field testing in the spring at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. Come launch day, Paul has big ideas for a glass-walled Lunar Lion operations center in a very public place on campus. He doesn’t want the excitement of launch or touchdown to fall flat, like his Messenger experience; he hopes the crowd will be so big that the mission will need to be video simulcast to satellite locations.
IN 2015, IF everything goes according to Paul’s plan, the Lunar Lion vehicle will be on its way out of Earth’s atmosphere. The team is currently testing various versions of descent and landing engines; a prototype of the craft will be constructed for field testing in the spring at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. Come launch day, Paul has big ideas for a glass-walled Lunar Lion operations center in a very public place on campus. He doesn’t want the excitement of launch or touchdown to fall flat, like his Messenger experience; he hopes the crowd will be so big that the mission will need to be video simulcast to multiple locations.
The project will contract with a commercial launch provider to handle the launch of the vehicle, and the Lu-nar Lion team will begin guiding the craft once it’s out of Earth’s atmosphere, roughly one-tenth of the way into the trip. Who will be operating the stick to steer the lander on its final descent to the moon is yet to be decided, but it could very well end up being a student. Ed Liszka, ARL’s director, says the students “will leave a legacy here at Penn State that will far outlast their college years.”
As the students involved in the project graduate, many will move on to careers in the emerging New Space industry. Policelli finished his graduate work in May, which freed him to dedicate the majority of his time to Lunar Lion. He plans to remain on the project until it wraps. Or, as he puts it more definitively, “until we land the Lunar Lion on the moon.” In the meantime, an assistantship through ARL—where his responsibilities beyond Lunar Lion include creating proposals for future space-related projects—will consume the rest of his daily routine. After Lunar Lion, Policelli hopes to land a job at SpaceX. “My ideal career trajectory would be to begin work on a human mission to Mars,” he says. “Even better would be to be in the rocket going to Mars."
It’s exactly that mentality—the lust to constantly push the boundaries of human knowledge and experience—that Paul says he aims to inspire not just in students, re-searchers, and university officials, but in everyone. And with the Lunar Lion mission, he has taken one giant leap toward that goal.