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@AuManufacturing Conversations
@AuManufacturing Conversations is a regular interview program hosted by Brent Balinski (with other hosts occasionally) bringing you discussions with the folks who are contributing to a critical part of the economy.
We hope to capture something of the variety of manufacturing, its place in the nation, its changing nature, and some of the personalities within it.
From the boutique to the billion dollar, if it's manufacturing and it's Australian, then it likely matters to us. This podcast is an extension of the @AuManufacturing news and analysis website and the community around it, and complements what's written online at www.aumanufacturing.com.au.
Interested in advertising? Get in touch via editor@aumanufacturing.com.au
@AuManufacturing Conversations
Episode 70 -- Joe Kenrick from Lunar Outpost Oceania
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
