At the dawn of the Space Age, conventional wisdom had it
that geostationary communication satellites would be too complex to be
commercially practical. Harold Rosen, who formed and led the team that designed
and built the first successful geostationary satellite, the spin-stabilized
Syncom launched in 1963, put that misconception to rest.
Then as now, Dr. Rosen has felt that many space exploration
missions could likewise be simplified. The announcement of the Google Lunar X
PRIZE has created the opportunity to demonstrate this.
To this end, and to compete for the grand prize, he has
pulled together a volunteer group of talented, experienced and enthusiastic
team members to form the Southern California Selene Group. These team members
constitute some of the finest engineering minds in the space business, with
over 130 space-related patents to their credit and active participation in over
500 space missions.
The architecture for the “Spirit of Southern California”
spacecraft will combine the elegantly simple control and communication systems
used in some of the earliest communications satellites with the latest in
electronic and sensor technology.
This approach taken by the Southern California Selene Group
can be succinctly summarized as “an elegantly simple design that can be
implemented quickly and inexpensively.”
