Tubular Spinning Lunar Lander

I came across this post and thought I’d pass it along given earlier E.R.P.S. discussions of a similar approach to the Google X-Prize Lunar Lander Prize. From the article in Science

As a legendary designer of communications satellites, Harold Rosen doesn’t need to spend his ninth decade figuring out how to land a cheap probe that can maneuver and send back pictures from the moon’s surface. But when Google announced last year that it was joining with the nonprofit X Prize Foundation to sponsor the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the National Medal of Technology winner decided to dust off an idea for a tubular, spinning payload that had been “in the back of my head” for decades.