Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image credit: Astrobotic

A Moon-bound spacecraft houses photographs, novels, student artwork – as well as a piece of Mount Everest.

Ready for departure is the Peregrine Mission One built by Astrobotic.

The lunar lander is toting 21 payloads (cargo) from governments, companies, universities, and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, all riding atop the maiden blastoff of the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan launch vehicle.

Celestial symmetry

Think of that outbound piece of Mt. Everest as a touch of celestial symmetry: A reach to space from the Everest Summit — the point on Earth closest to the lunar surface — to the Moon itself.

Image credit: Michael Kronmiller

“The payload is meant to commemorate a collaborative project I ran back in junior and senior year of high school,” says Michael Kronmiller. The adventurous story is captured in manuscript excerpts of “From Everest to the Moon – Against All Odds at the Frontiers of Possibility: ‘The Garuda Project.’”

It’s a tale spurred by a low-cost small unmanned drone design for applications such as high altitude search and rescue. Also involved are educators and students at Kanjirowa National Secondary School in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. Then there’s Aang Tshering Lama a renowned guide that has summited Everest numerous times and conducted the highest ever rescue operation on the mountain. He gifted the summit fragment for packaging as a DHL MoonBox payload for inclusion on Peregrine Mission One.

Image credit: Michael Kronmiller

Strict rules

During Kronmiller’s time at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), he and a partner collaborated on the design to meet the payload limitations Astrobotic and DHL provided. “I was managing the finances for our campus makerspace the RPI Forge and was able to make some prototypes, the final version, and copies of the payload on our laser cutter,” he tells Inside Outer Space.

The effort also meant learning about what it takes to qualify a payload for space missions, complying with strict requirements and stringent limitations. Those rules called for payloads that did not exceed one inch in diameter and 0.125 inch in thickness.

The front payload itself includes the names of some of the key contributors on the project who were directly involved in the development and testing of the Small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS). The back features the project’s mission statement: “Humanitarian Relief, Innovation, Education, International Collaboration.”

Image credit: Michael Kronmiller

One rope at a time

Kronmiller points out that his project advisor, former NASA astronaut, Scott Parazynski, carried a Moon rock to Mt. Everest.

In February 2010 during the space shuttle STS-130 mission, a plaque containing moon rocks collected during the Apollo 11 mission and a rock from the summit of Mt. Everest made it to the International Space Station.

At a White House meeting of the National Space Council, in June 2018, Kronmiller adds, Parazynski recalled his Everest Summit climb and likened space exploration to mountaineering: “One rope at a time,” he said. Vice President Mike Pence, who was chair of the council gathering, thought for a moment, and then, repeated, ‘One rope at a time.’ He paused, again, and said, ‘I like that.’

Yes, life does have its symmetries, Kronmiller concludes.