The summer went by fast and now school is back in session. As I mentioned last week, we had an opportunity to see our NASA interns graduate at UAHuntsville. We lost some good talent, but some of them will go back to school and one of them plans to stay in Huntsville and work. We hope to hear more from him soon.

While they were at Dynetics for 10 weeks, we challenged them with a Design Task related to the Rocket City Space Pioneers Lander. We have been looking for a way to do low-cost testing in a 1/6 gravity environment. Past systems we have built and flown with our NASA customer required us to integrate a 5/6 G earth-cancelling thruster into the system. The fact is if we had not done that, the landers we had built in the past would not have even left the ground because of the influence of Earth’s gravity, i.e., they were designed for flying and landing on the Moon.

We challenged the students to design a method to test guidance and control systems in a 1/6 G controlled environment without flying actual hardware. We were really looking for a solution that offered testing without elaborate tethers and spring mechanisms to offset Earth’s gravitational influence. These young engineers came up with a great solution. They designed a universal test platform that could float on air bearings utilizing either cold gas or live rocket engines in order to control the platform’s motions. The electronics, i.e., GNC, would actually be the brains that we would be testing on this 1/6 G simulation platform.

We think they did an awesome job doing detailed design on this challenge. In fact, we are looking at ways to possibly build such a system with our various partners who could use this as a universal test platform for testing various GNC and propulsion architectures in the future.

Thanks, Frank Six and your great team of up-and-coming talented engineers!

Tim Pickens explains the NASA interns' concept at a recent Huntsville Center for Technology planning meeting.