[alexander]

Hey, hey, i give ideas, you guys make what you make of them

here are some more...

yes, it seems that high altitude ballons would probably not provide a good platform for a launch, another cool thing to do, would be a hypersonic air plane
(examples in history)

[TheBigDog]

Suit up rocketeers, I will be back in town soon.

Bill

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by TheBigDog

Suit up rocketeers, I will be back in town soon.

Your return cannot come too soon, IMHO

In the absence of a ringleader, I’ve slacked off completely on the Google X prize, having in short time built a nice framework, in the past 60 days I’ve done nothing to my MUMPS-based simulator to add the modules needed to actually run a guidance program for an earth orbit-to-landing. I’m all thought, no action!

At a New Year’s party, I discovered that a semi-professional astronomer friend is actually a professional vacuum pump salesman. So the prospect of actually being able to create my own little box of moon-like vacuum in my basement seems, if not certainly within my mechanical grasp, at least affordable.

Now, if only the pesky Payment Card Industry (PCI) would stop pestering me at work, I’d surely have all the time I need… The nerve of those multi-trillion dollar industry councils – do they think we have nothing better to do than protect their highly profitable participating organizations from losses due to credit card fraud?! My business is supposed to be enhancing medical quality of care, damnit!

[TheBigDog]

Originally Posted by CraigD

Your return cannot come too soon, IMHO

Thanks, Craig!

I am back from my sabbatical, and I am ready to get to work. I am going to be focusing on two areas for our X-Prize entry. 1) I am going to be working on the overall mission profile to help keep the ideas flowing into creative and plausible plans. In that regard I will be working with every team. 2) I am going to build a working rover that will be controllable via the internet. As it gets closer to a usable state I will work with Tormod and creating a portal here at Hypo for observing it in action, and letting people take turns driving it around our initial lunar surface simulator (the area around my house in range of my wireless internet). The overall plan is going to be an ongoing work in progress with each team determining their own deadlines.

I will add details about the rover in the rover thread. I am also going to start a thread that summarizes all of our work to date so a person can see the current state of the mission profile without having to hunt all over to find it. I will work on that this week, but it is third behind school and work, so my progress may be slow.

If you are new to the site, or just finding this thread, you are more than welcome to join in the fun. That is all for now.

Bill

[TheBigDog]

Today felt like the first day of spring. The sun was out and the birds were singing. I took the kids to the park and we played tag on the new playground equipment. The lake is melted and was almost perfectly calm and flat so we spent some time skipping stones and speculating about how long it would take to throw every rock at the edge of the lake into the lake. We decided it would take forever. But all of that is just window dressing around the point of this post. Spring means spring cleaning, and spring cleaning means cleaning out the garage. And cleaning out the garage means working on the lunar rover. I hope to be busy with it in a few weeks.

Now I must warn everyone that I am going to be on a thin time budget, just a couple hours each week, so I will so a bit, play a bit with it, post about it, and let it go until the next time. I love the intellectual puzzle of this project, but spending too much time with it is not a top priority, and spending money on it is even lower. I am hoping that my son John works on it with me, but he is more likely to be preparing a costume for the Ren Fair than interested in space exploration. We will see. I will make some basic design drawing and include pictures and specs of the RC car I bought for the project last fall. I might still do that this weekend. Hell, I might do that right now, I have a few minutes...

Bill