Here’s a summary update to let everyone know the latest as we enter 2016.

From the initial reaction to our recent call to the space industry, I am confident we will be getting sufficient response to proceed. There will be many discussions to follow with a view to formulating, over the course of 2016, a procurement plan for developing and agreeing the detailed commercial arrangement we need for the main stage of the project. In parallel, we will be pursuing the public sector side of the arrangement involving a lead space agency. I expect that contractually bonding the public and private sectors together will take up most of three years.

The science team continues to form working groups, some more advanced than others. As we get more individuals joining, it’s interesting to see how they often go back to the basics of our project, and work through for themselves its logic to arrive at the assumptions we’ve made so far. That process alone helps to manage what the specialist working groups have to do. To help, we now have a dedicated Project Manager for the science team.

The sales and marketing plan involves extra resources and it will probably take a few more months before we can make announcements. Please be patient.

In January, we shall be starting to plan the pilot education programme. We have agreed to work with the World Space Week Association to use its annual event in October as a kind of staging post for schools to show their activities from the previous year – supported by competitions, using the opportunity for networking, and promoting the plans for the following year.

Our local Chapters of LM1 enthusiasts now include leadership in seven countries: Saudi Arabia, France, USA, UK, India, Pakistan and Bolivia. If you’d like to join, or even set up a Chapter in a new country, please contact us here.

We are changing our collaboration platform to make it more participatory and will be Beta testing it in the next few weeks. There are some LM1 challenges and issues which I am sure will engage, indeed create, international communities of interest – some ideas have been suggested or hinted in the posts to date. “Watch this space.”

We now have long term relationships with four universities, each exploiting LM1 for educational projects for undergraduates and postgraduates:-
- Chapman University in California for brand marketing;
- International Space University in France for the whole project;
- Cranfield University in the UK for mission technology;
- Portsmouth University in the UK for drilling technology. 

You can see the latest on who’s involved in LM1 in Meet the Team.

Happy New Year to all!!

All Best,

David