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Cardinal Space Mining hosts CoSMiC, an alternative lunabotics competition

May 19, 2025
This photo shows the Cardinal Space Mining team and its robot. The team tied for the championship of the 2024 NASA Lunabotics Challenge.
The student-engineers of Cardinal Space Mining shared the grand prize with the University of Alabama's Astrobotics club at the 2024 NASA Lunabotics Challenge at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo courtesy of Cardinal Space Mining.  

AMES, Iowa – After sharing the grand prize of the 2024 NASA Lunabotics Challenge, Iowa State University’s Cardinal Space Mining Club heard some tough news from the annual NASA competition for mini mining robots.

NASA had trimmed the number of teams that could compete in 2025. Cardinal Space Mining didn’t qualify to defend their co-championship. There would be no May trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Other teams with a record for success also missed the cut.

“Our team was significantly hurt by the news,” said Jim Heise, the team’s long-time adviser and a Distinguished Professor of Practice in mechanical engineering. “I told them we need to do something positive and asked the students to think about it.”

Jacob Mosier, a junior from Minneapolis who’s studying mechanical engineering and computer science and who leads the team working on the controls for Cardinal Space Mining’s robot, said missing a trip to NASA was frustrating for the team.

“We were really expecting to go – especially after tying for first last year,” he said.

Giving up for a year wasn’t really an option.

“We needed a reason to keep on existing this year as a club,” Mosier said. 

Could the team organize and host an alternative competition? There was some precedent. The University of Alabama organized competitions when NASA couldn’t host because of the pandemic.

The team decided to try. 

“We’re dedicated to doing something that’s hard,” Jacob Mosier said of designing, building, testing and running a mining robot. “And now we’re joining up and doing something that’s even harder.”

It built a budget by recruiting some sponsors, including Iowa State’s College of Engineering; Collins Aerospace; Caterpillar Inc.; the Iowa Space Grant Consortium; Mechdyne, a technology company with Iowa State roots; Danfoss, an engineering company with an Ames operation; and SICK, a sensor company.

The support helped launch the Collegiate Space Mining Competition (dubbed CoSMiC) May 21-24 at the Student Innovation Center with team camps in Howe Hall. May 21 will be a move-in day. May 22-24 will see mining competition from 8 a.m. to about 7 p.m. 

The event is free and open to the public, with livestreams playing on the big screen at the Student Innovation Center’s “Stepatorium.”

Teams from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, San Diego State University, the University of Arkansas, Arizona State University, Ohio State University, North Dakota State University and others have expressed interest in competing.

As competition hosts, Mosier said Cardinal Space Mining will not be a scored competitor. But the team will run its robot in demonstration runs.

After all, he said, the club has robot research and development to do.

The goal is to build a robot that’s autonomous, truly capable of operating on its own, as it mines and collects simulated lunar soil to build berms for mission-critical uses such as blast and radiation protection.

Mosier said he’s proud of the club and its members for taking on the task of hosting a lunabotics competition.

“We’re dedicated to doing something that’s hard,” he said of designing, building, testing and running a mining robot. “And now we’re joining up and doing something that’s even harder.”

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