Episode 70 -- Joe Kenrick from Lunar Outpost Oceania

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In this episode of @AuManufacturing Conversations with Brent Balinski, we hea from Joseph Kenrick, Program Manager at Lunar Outpost Oceania. He tells us about the EPE & Lunar Outpost Oceania Consortium, which is up against the AROSE consortium in a bid to build an Australian rover for the Trailblazer program. The winner's semi-autonomous rover could be on the moon as soon as 2026, where it will collect regolith and deliver it to a NASA payload, which will attempt to extract oxygen from the sample.
Episode guide

0:29 – Career path. Engineering for the petroleum industry, then a career shift.

1:29 – Earth has been a closed-loop system for 4.5 billion years.”Biological history tells us: any time we’ve seen a dominant species in a finite ecosystem consuming a limited amount of resources, that species collapses. It’s only a matter of time. Naturally, this thinking led me to the field of space resources.”

2:00 – Joining Lunar Outpost about two years ago.

2:32 – Moving to Melbourne from Colorado in May.

3:28 – Nowadays there are many pathways into the space industry, “and really anyone can be involved.”

4:28 – Big Dipper and Little Dipper challenges around the excavation subsystems.

5:08 – Early observations on Australia’s space sector, its strengths, and the challenges it will face in this Trailblazer mission.

7:02 – The partnership co-leading the Trailblazer team with EPE.

8:18 – What Lunar Outpost does and some of its current projects, including lunar rovers that are headed to the Lunar South Pole and Reiner Gamma regions on the moon.

10:08 - Existing spaceflight heritage on the Perseverance rover on mars.

11:10 – Some of the challenges to building a robotic system for the moon, including extreme temperature swings, jagged regolith, and no GPS.

13:40 – Potential commercial spinoffs from this R&D.

14:48 – Competition to name Australia’s lunar rover.

15:50 – The two consortia vying to build Australia’s rover.

17:15 – Some of the partners on the team. including Vipack, RMIT, Titomic, Inovor, One Giant Leap and others.
Useful links
The Lunar Outpost Oceania website
https://www.lunaroutpost.com.au/
AROSE lunar rover to test Australian technology capabilities
Australians invited to name upcoming locally-made lunar rover
AROSE and EPE to design lunar rovers following grant awards
Applications open for up to $4 m grant funding to help design an Australian lunar rover
Australia is putting a rover on the Moon in 2024 to search for water
Australia to develop small Moon rover – video