“LEAPFROG-A Low Cost Flight-capable Lander” A Study of Student Research Project to Business Transformation (A Business Model)

Paper number

IAC-08.E6.1.14

Author

Mr. Sanket Nayak, University of Southern California, United States

Year

2008

Abstract

Trace back in time and study the current market scenario, and you would find that numerous successful start-up companies have their roots grounded in universities. It has been a trend with software companies atleast that university research groups or a group of students have come up with an idea or accomplished a project, and the project actually makes it big in the market opening up the scope for entrepreneurship. Let it be Apple, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google or Orkut; each of these have grown from student research groups to companies.

The idea of this paper is to highlight and showcase a research project going on at The University of Southern California (USC). The project “Lunar Entry and Approach Platform for Research on Ground” or better known as the acronym “LEAPFROG” is a low-cost flight capable lander to demonstrate Descent and Landing profiles. The concept of “LEAPFROG” goes back to the Apollo Era and draws coherence to certain extent from the Lunar Lander Research Vehicle (LLRV) developed by NASA Dryden Research Center back then in 1960’s.

The project “LEAPFROG” is aimed at providing low-cost on ground simulation platform to companies and research organizations who want to test their payloads before and check out the landing profiles before actually investing a lot of money on it. Hence, in nutshell it’s a “Test-Bed”. The paper also throws light on the scope of the project, possible business opportunities and also considerable technical specifications of the lander vehicle. The basic idea is to prove the potential of a student research project at university level to create a niche for its own in the current competitive aerospace and astronautics industry. A poster describing the structure of “LEAPFROG” would also be presented.

Abstract document

IAC-08.E6.1.14.pdf

Manuscript document

(absent)