Hello, there, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet: My name is Jeff Cunningham, Director of Public Affairs and your point-of-contact with Earthrise, better known as Team Omega Envoy. I’ll be posting from time to time on our mission’s progress, as well as weighing in my thoughts and perspective on the importance of the X Prize competition, space in general, and how it all impacts the average Joe Blogreader (hint: it’s a good thing).

There’s a great deal to catch you all up on. First of all, publicity: Jason Dunn and I had the great honor and delight of speaking at the Space Vision 2008 Conference put on by Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at Texas A&M University. For those of you just tuning in, SEDS was founded some years ago by three close friends and classmates while students at MIT. Among them were Bob Richards, CEO of Odyssey Moon, one of our competitors, and Peter Diamandis himself, Founder and Chairman of the X Prize Foundation. I’m sure I speak for us both when I say SEDS has done a lot for me in my life and career (and given me more than a few stories for the grandkids), and we were glad to have a chance to give back.

It was also truly great to meet Will Pomerantz (himself another SEDS alumnus) in person to discuss the contest, and to spend a weekend with so many others who share our passion. Our presentation, along with the others who presented, was videotaped, but they (Texas) have yet to post it. They’re probably preoccupied with final exams around this time. If they’re unable to, I’ll get permission from them to post up my copy of the footage so you all can see how awkward we are on stage.

Next, a technical update. There has been next to nothing said here so far in terms of our progress in actually making the rover, which will no longer be the case from here on out. I’ll start by backing up and talking about our overarching strategy. This team started as a group of engineering students meeting in secret, and was founded on the basic principles of engineering: Solve the problem in the simplest, most inexpensive and efficient way possible. To that end, our design and mission architecture is nearly entirely based on the use of available, “off-the-shelf” hardware. In the years since the heroes of Apollo landed on the moon, the aerospace industry has matured to the point where there’s really no need to re-invent the wheel.

In fact, thanks to these advances in technology and market development, we decided that there is no reason why the Google Lunar X Prize can not be won for less than the prize money offered. Merely a year ago, such a notion seemed unattainable, but with the successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket, we don’t sound so crazy when we assert that this is entirely within the realm of possibility. All that remains to us is to design a simple, cost-effective rover craft.

You may have seen our initial concept, our beloved shoebox-on-wheels. We’ve since re-examined our design, and will soon post a render of our most current iteration, which folds up more compactly into our payload fairing—and looks really darn cool. I swear, with the reflective exterior we added for thermal protection and the surface on front that takes on the appearance of a “grill”, it’s like how Wall*E would’ve looked if he’d been built by BMW.

It’s by no means finished (otherwise, this’d be a launch announcement); there’s a great deal of tweaking to be done to accommodate additional cameras and different computer packages we’re looking at. I myself hope to spend some time during our semester break looking at the possibility of swapping out some of the structural members in the body for composites. This would help reduce the weight and improve the rover’s thermal characteristics.

That’s all for now. In future posts, I’ll catch you up on how our team was formed, and the adventure we’ve been on ever since. I’m also truly blessed to work with an amazing group of dedicated and talented men and women on this project, and look forward to introducing you to them. Until then, do yourself a favor and steal a skyward glance tonight before you call it a day. Think of it as “Carpe Astra”.