Monday, March 18, 2013

Golden Spike and LPI schedule 2013 conference

Notional view of NASA's recently-abandoned Altair lunar lander, on a pad in the Moon's high northern latitudes formed from sintered regolith. Golden Spike Company announced in January Altair's designer Northrup Grumman to initiate design work on a manned lunar lander to return to the Moon by 2020.
The Golden Spike Company of Boulder, Colorado has announced an international workshop next October "to explore the kinds of landing sites, experiments, and geological traverses their astronauts should undertake on the Moon starting in 2020."

The two-day seminar will be held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute (LPI) in Houston, October 3-4, 2013.  

The program committee includes Alan Stern, Golden Spike CEO and President, Steve Mackwell of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Clive Neal of Notre Dame, William McKinnon of Washington University, Amand Mahesh of Open University, Dr. Daniel Durda of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and James Carpenter of the European Space Agency.

“We’re excited to announce this workshop, which will seek input from lunar researchers from across the world regarding scientific priorities for Golden Spike expeditions, Stern said. "We also expect this workshop to multiply interest in our missions from science and space agencies across the globe.”

“It is great to be part of the beginning of a new age of space exploration where commercial entities step up as key enablers of manned exploration of the solar system, and it is so appropriate this first meeting will be held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute, with its roots in the Apollo era,” Mackwell added.

The workshop will consist of plenary and a poster sessions organized around topical themes, invited presentations, and discussion panels. Stern and Golden Spike’s board chair Gerry Griffin, former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, will offer a public presentation about Golden Spike, Thursday evening, October 3.

More information about this workshop, including an opportunity to provide an expression of interest in attending and potentially speaking, can be found HERE.

Related Posts:
Golden Spike taps Northrup Grumman to design manned lunar lander
(Ben Evans, AmericaSpace, January 13, 2013)
Turning science fiction to science fact (Jeff Foust, The Space Review, December 11, 2012)

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