NASA Patents Faster, Cheaper Route For Traveling to the Moon - Flaze News

The new technique, patented by NASA in June, is meant for small unmanned missions to the Moon.

When it comes to space travel, even a small cost reduction can come to an enormous sum of money and resources. With that in mind, NASA has just patented a new method to get to the Moon faster and cheaper, and it's not via a newfangled spacecraft technology.

The space organization has revealed that it has discovered a new trajectory to the Moon that will get future missions to our celestial neighbor more efficiently.

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NASA's new method allows for a small unmanned spacecraft to reach the Moon relatively quickly and on very little fuel. 

The method, which was patented by NASA in June, sees the unmanned spacecraft essentially hitch a ride with communication satellites in order to reach high-Earth orbit before using the Earth's and the moon's gravity to perform a slingshot maneuver to the Moon.

The patent describes the maneuver as a "method for transferring a spacecraft from geosynchronous transfer orbit to lunar orbit."

As Business Insider reports, the first spacecraft to use the new trajectory will be the Dark Ages Polarimeter Pathfinder (Dapper), a mission developed by the University of Colorado Boulder which will set out to record from the far side of the Moon, for the first time, low-frequency radio waves that were emitted during the Universe's early formation.

Speed and patents, which were first seen by lawyer Jeff Stack, reportedly need to reduce the cost of the space mission to the extent possible, as it was on a relatively low budget for the space mission at $150,000,000.

"The moon rose out of necessity, as these things often do," Jack Burns, an astronomer at Colorado Boulder and the leader of the Sitra Mission, told Business Insider. "We need to find a cheaper way to keep launch costs low and get to the moon."

While the new method will not be as fast as the Apollo 11 mission, which will reach the moon in just a few days, it is known much faster than the smaller mission that uses very little rocket fuel. NASA estimates that the moon's journey will take two and a half months, while similar-sized missions usually take up to six months.