He set about implementing the project together with his partner Michael Hascher and a team of design engineers and milling machine operators. They faced three major challenges.
The concerns expressed by the aerospace companies proved to be true: the design had to be modified to make the components millable at all. "All of the walls are very thin, because in the aerospace sector every gram counts," explains Flieher. One need only consider the current lunar freight costs, which start at 800 000 euros per kilogram.
Secondly, the deadline of just under two months was extremely tight. This is nothing new in the lunar mission business; NASA also faced enormous deadline pressure after John F. Kennedy announced his intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
Thirdly, the extremely long production times of up to 14 hours had to be implemented with existing capacities and despite full order books. "The only way was to exploit nights and weekends using our own automation technology,” says Flieher. "This included our assembly robot in combination with StateMonitor from HEIDENHAIN, which actively informs us about the statuses of our machines."