As of yesterday 01 October 2015, a team is hoping to raise £600k (~$911k) to fund a Moon impactor via Kickstarter, which should cover the costs of building and testing a two-stage rocket, a spacecraft with what seems like a custom propulsion subsystem, and a small titanium dart which should impact the Moon.
Their feasibility study seems quite imprecise and amateurish to me. Maybe are aerospace engineers not the targeted audience despite the purpose of the document being to "outline the technical requirements for reaching the mission goal and present a starting point for ongoing research and development."
How complete and technically feasible is the information presented in the feasibility study?
Below are some extracts which seem imprecise or even incorrect to me. I have added a short comment, which may be very wrong, so please correct me if needed.
Section 6.1
The trajectory from LEO towards the Moon is known as a Hohmann Maneuver, by which the spacecraft transitions from LEO to an elliptical orbit, intersecting the trajectory of the Moon.
An Hohmann transfer is one of the many different trajectories to go from one orbit to another. In actual operations, these transfers do not use the exact theoretical definition of these orbits (due to orbit corrections after adequately ranging the spacecraft while in transit).
Section 6.3
LEO altitude must be high enough to limit drag-induced altitude loss, e.g. 200 km.
To start with, what is the inclination and eccentricity of this parking orbit, then we can talk about the three other orbital parameters which are independent from time (i.e. all but the true anomaly)? If the vehicle is in such a low orbit for only a very limited amount of time before heading on towards the Moon, drag is not much of a problem in itself.
Section 7
Spacecraft shall utilize non-cryogenic propellants, as the expected nominal mission time will otherwise result in excessive propellant boil-off.
Depending on the materials used to insulate the fuel tank, boil-off can be completely negligible for most months-long missions, or am I completely mistaken?
I haven't read the full feasibility study, so I'm sure there are many passages I would question in the rest as well.