Budget and Timeline

Cost Analysis

The cost of the project is going to be driven mainly by the cost of the hardware and the cost of sending the hardware from the Earth to the Moon. For the launch, we are going to use the services provided by the company Spacex (http://www.spacex.com/). The cost of sending a payload with them is around 7 million dollars. Hardware cost includes parts used to build the rover and the moon station. Transmitted power cost is based on an estimated $1 million per watt. Miscellaneous costs include unforeseen contingencies that might come up during the design. Overhead cost is based on a 50% rate. The table below shows the main items driving the cost of the project.

Timeline

The GANT chart below shows the planned progress of the project. The building phase includes finding all the hardware needed and putting it together to build both the lunar rover and the small base station to be deployed on the moon. Because of the nature of this enterprise, a long period of time will be dedicated to testing and finalizing all the details. It is absolutely crucial that everything is ready before the launch day, since no repairs, or any work in general, will be possible once the launch vehicle departs.