Mexico Has Bought a Toaster Oven-Sized Payload for a Mission to the Moon Andrea Noel - VICE News
go to original June 25, 2015

Mexico has purchased a toaster oven-size space on a payload destined for the Moon, in hopes of making history as the first Latin American nation to be a "sovereign client" on a lunar mission.

Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based startup spun out from the Carnegie Mellon University, has offered to ferry the country into space in 2016 with a ride on their privately built lunar module.

Now the country's mission is to "design and develop a usable Mexican payload to be included in a moon mission, to conduct experiments on the lunar surface," according to a statement earlier this month from Mexico's science and technology council.



Mexico will develop an apparatus weighing about a half-kilo, or about 1.1 pounds, to attach to Astrobotic's private Griffin Lander, at a cost of about $600,000. The company hopes the launch will win them Google's $30 million Lunar-X prize, for the first successful moon landing by an independently financed robot.

"We would anticipate something on the order of a shoebox or a toaster," Astrobotic CEO John Thornton told Aviation Week, regarding the size of the device Mexico will send into space, the purpose of which has not yet been determined.

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