Some new young faces have been seen at Dynetics recently. This is because we have brought in engineering students in the last two weeks who will be working on our Lunar Lander design. As Andy Crocker mentioned in his blog last week, Dynetics and the Rocket City Space Pioneers are hosting four student interns as part of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center’s Robotics Academy. We now have an additional student who started this week to also support serious design efforts relating to our development lander. Peter Davison is our latest student.

I had the honor of meeting these students this week at Dynetics headquarters. These students are excited to be working some real hardware issues, and not just notional studies. I want to thank The NASA Robotics Academy and Frank Six who runs this NASA program that I supported over the last three years, now as a Dynetics employee, and previously as president of Orion Propulsion. NASA has some amazing students they attract from some of the most prestigious colleges in the United States. These guys are the cream of the crop. Thanks, NASA.

Speaking of amazing students, we had a really fun time today with the X-treme Team during a live interview that Michael Doornbos of evadot.com put together to discuss Legos’ latest contest , the “Moonbots” challenge.

We had fun meeting the X-Treme Team today via phone. These students are fired up, and want to win this competition using the RCSP rover as their theme and baseline for going forward. These kids, whose average age was 10 ½, asked some tough questions like, “Would you be building hardware if there was no Google Prize?” They also asked questions about technical challenges, meteorites, power, etc.

I got to ask them some questions too, like, “What makes you think your team is going to win the First Lego Moonbot competition?” We had lots of fun, and I was encouraged by their questions, enthusiasm, and their spirit to be the best.

We will keep an eye on these guys!