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Voiceover: Three, two, one, zero, all engines running ... liftoff.
Landing on the moon, even an unmanned spacecraft,
has only ever been done by the United States, Soviet Russia, and now China. And to say that
the fourth entity on the moon is going to be not just private space, but university,
is amazing to me.
No university has ever done this before. This is going to
be the biggest thing to happen to the space industry probably since the Apollo moment.
We can reignite the human imagination.
We're doing a goal that not many people, not your
average or common-day student would even think about doing.
I realize that space is not something that
other people did, it's someone that I can do.
This whole scenario is surreal
to me. I'm at an institution that's actually attempting to go to the moon. What could be
cooler than that?
What we're doing here at Penn State with the Lunar
Lion is: We have to build a spacecraft that will land on the moon. We're giving a whole
new generation of students the opportunity to do this, not just professionals.
The fact that we have
a university-led team, really a bunch of undergraduates at the helm of this, is absolutely remarkable.
Your textbooks and your classes can only teach you so much, so it's real exciting,
we're testing rocket engines, we are doing rocket science.
One of our industrial engineering students, Kris Doll, he said, "Hey, if we're
going build these, if we do it this way, not the way that they've done it before, but if
we do it this way, they'll be easier to build. And we took it to NASA, and they looked at
it and they said, "Can we have one?"
We're capable of doing this and we will do it.
We have the minds, we have the ambition, we have the ability.
And our spacecraft is going to be part of that landscape far past the
rest of human civilization as we know it.
Can you imagine in 2,000 years seeing the Lunar
Lion on the moon?
You are helping a group of students do what has never been done before.
It's not just this corporation is doing something.
It's students.
I helped put something on the moon before I finished
my undergrad.
This is something that's bigger than the University.
It's bigger than any of the students involved. It's something that's going to, I think, revolutionize
the way that space is done.
I'm doing something that's going to go out there, and it's something that I
can tell my kids and my grandkids: "You won't believe it now, but I have something up on
the moon."