Last Friday, I was on my way to Huntsville Alabama to represent the Lunar Lions at the International Space Development Conference. While traveling, a gentlemen in the airport asked me, "Business or pleasure?" "Both," I replied, since I love working for the Lunar Lions. I was excited to be traveling to so-called "Rocket City." Huntsville has deep connection to and rich connection with the US space program. It was here that Wernher von Braun, "father of the Saturn V," was relocated to in 1950, as well as where the Saturn V's were manufactured.

On Friday night I got a chance to see a test in person at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, a humbling experience. While upright it would have stood over 110m tall and 10m wide, and it dwarfs anything produced before and since.

(Since I didn't get a chance to take as good of a picture, here is one from Wikipedia taken from outside the center)

On Saturday Evadot.com founder Michael Doornbos hosted a panel of GLXP teams to talk about our teams and answer audience questions. Representatives from Rocket City Space Pioneers, Part Time Scientists, Team FREDNET, Omega Envoy, and Team JURBAN, all sat on the panel with me where we fielded questions from Doornbos and then the crowd.

It is interesting to note how dramatically different our plans are to accomplish the same task of going to the moon, taking pictures and video, sending the data back to Earth, and moving 500 meters and repeating. While we are planning on making a hopper, the teams that are doing rovers have dramatically different ideas, and at least Team FREDNET is planning on roving and hopping. That is one of the amazing things about the GLXP. The spirit of competition brings together vastly dynamic and individual teams whose success will eventually be measured on the lunar surface.

Each team is competing against each other, though it is a friendly competition. I spent a good amount of time talking to the representatives of each team - they are all very outgoing and their enthusiasm to be working on the project is evident, as it should be! While everyone has invested a lot of time, energy, and pride into their design and thinks theirs will be the winning combination, (our team is no exception,) but everyone kept their reservations about another team's plan to themselves. The reality is, we all have something to contribute until all the prizes are won or the competition is over.