Collaboration & Innovation
Welcome to Lunar Missions Labs – one of the most distinctive, world-changing aspects of the Lunar Mission One programme, innovating space exploration not just by what we’re achieving, but by how we innovate: with Everyone and Anyone. The Labs is Lunar Mission One’s innovative collaborative ideas platform, an incubator for backers’ ideas for the project, in collaboration with the UK’s Space Catapult.
Lunar Missions Labs Aims and Objectives
The space mission itself will be developed and managed professionally, under commercial contract with industry. However, determining what the mission will deliver to the Moon, and how engineers and scientists will undertake their pioneering work, provides an opportunity for the crowdsourcing of ideas. There is lots of scope for working things out to facilitate the project’s research and educational objectives.
Just as Lunar Mission One began with a successful Kickstarter campaign ‘for Everyone’, Lunar Missions Labs creates the opportunities for anyone to try to answer the Mission’s many Challenges – from spacecraft design and landing site selection, to drilling technologies and power requirements, and from archive creation to ensuring future discovery, and every aspect in between, including the project’s social and cultural opportunities.
As detailed elsewhere on our site, we have the support of teams of highly experienced scientists, engineers, and discipline specialists, all leaders in their fields. But how much more can we achieve, how much more quickly and effectively, if we harness the creative powers from around the World, beginning with the Lunar Missions Club? Even the largest corporations with high-spending research-and-development teams, from energy to pharmaceuticals, have discovered that enlisting the collective power of on-line contributors can greatly enhance and speed the process of discovery, invention and design, and social innovators from Wikipedia to OpenIDEO have demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing knowledge and ideas.
Lunar Mission Labs invites the World, with the Lunar Missions Club in the vanguard, to help us undertake the first mission to the Moon for Everyone, by Anyone.
How the Labs Work
The Lunar Missions Labs, when fully developed, will provide new methods of engaging people in technically sophisticated and ambitious science projects.
Each Lunar Mission One working team and sub-group might set general or specific Challenges which could be openly posted on the site: we might invite for example best ideas for a Digital Elevation Model for landing site selection, adaptation of subsea wire-line drilling for digging our core samples on the Moon, or best durable materials and inscription techniques to aid future discovery. Recognising that we may not have spotted all the gaps in our mission planning, we will welcome too unsolicited ideas for Challenges, ideas that themselves can be developed within the Lunar Missions Labs.
Expert moderators from the Lunar Mission One working groups and from supporting professional institutions will monitor and engage an open dialogue with Challenge respondents, and we are looking into ways they will be able to facilitate on-line voting processes to advance specific challenge ideas into a unique Lab space for further refinement. At the appropriate stage of development, in some areas, a fully secure specific Challenge site will be opened to invited respondents, complete with mutually agreed non-disclosure and intellectual property protections. Where specific tools and hardware are required (e.g. for Computer Aided Design, hardware modelling) we would look to provide these wherever possible to invited respondents.
Challenge respondents advancing to unique Labs spaces (Labs Members) as well as Labs Finalists and Labs Challenge Winners will be acknowledged on the site, with their status noted on all site comments boards.
The Lunar Missions Labs will therefore work in two main stages. Stage one will take place on the Labs forum, which is already up and running. Stage two will occur on a specific Challenge site, which will be delivered in the next few months. We therefore expect the Labs to be fully functional by August.
Lab Zones and Getting Started!
Lunar Missions Labs feature specific Zones that directly parallel the organisation of the Education, Mission and Science Teams and their working groups. This is very much by design – when you are responding to Challenges in a given Lab Zone, you are working in tandem with the artists, archivists, designers, engineers, researchers and scientists taking us to the Moon – and when you advance through the Challenges with us, you are much more than a supporter, you are one of that team!
Our Lab Zones include:
MISSION
- Payload
- Launch
- Lunar Approach and Descent
- Drilling and Sampling Technologies
- Surface Power, Communications, Protection
- Permanent Sign
SCIENCE
- Site Selection
- Core Sample Management, Classification and Storage
- Geology
- Manned Base
- Astronomy
- Durability Prediction
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
- Data Storage and Materials
- Data Archiving and Organisation
- Data Networking and Security
- DNA Storage and Handling
EDUCATION
- STEM Subjects
- Cultural Subjects and Public Archive
PUBLIC ARCHIVE
- Humanities
- Biosphere
- Communication and Explanation
SALES, MARKETING and PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
- Private Archive
- Merchandise
- Film
- Art
- Music
- Prose
- Poetry
- Competitions
- Events
- Internationalisation