Ellicott City nonprofit needs $25K to send student-designed payloads to Moon [VIDEO]

Crowdfunding of the Week is a regular series highlighting the technology, creative and innovation crowdfunding campaigns in Baltimore that might be worth your support. This week’s project comes from Indiegogo. See other Crowdfundings of the Week here. 
Interested in going to the Moon, middle and high school students?
Ellicott City-based nonprofit Innovate Our World (IOW) can’t promise to send students on a lunar mission, but it is hosting a Moon Mission Challenge to give students a chance to design a payload that might be carried aboard a robot’s trip to the moon in 2015. To pull it off, IOW will need $25,000, which it’s now raising via Indiegogo campaign.
Donate to the campaign here.
The brass tacks, broadly, of this Moon Mission Challenge:

• IOW is now in partnership with three teams (two companies and a student-team from Penn State) participating in the Google Lunar XPRIZE: any private group that lands a robot on the Moon’s surface, travels 500 meters and sends back two “Mooncasts” to Earth are eligible to win prizes worth, in total, $40 million.
• Teams of middle and high school students from the Baltimore region that enter IOW’s challenge will have to design payloads for these robots to carry to the Moon’s surface that will assist the robots in carrying out one of three missions, outlined here.
• To prepare, those student-teams in IOW’s Moon Mission Challenge will learn about maneuvering unmanned craft on the Moon with the help of the Cyber STEM Academy, a virtual learning environment designed by local startup Immersive 3D, which Technically Baltimore covered here.

Students will also have the chance to work with engineers from Astrobotic Technology (a Pittsburgh-based company competing for the Lunar XPRIZE).
The culminating event of the Moon Mission Challenge, which kicks off January 2014, will be in April 2014, when student-teams present their payload designs at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C.
Watch Innovate Our World’s campaign video: