We had a really good long overdue RCSP Engineering Meets Education (EME) Team Meeting last night to discuss where the RCSP program is in general, and to let our partners at Huntsville Center for Technology (HCT) show us their cool progress and give us a tour of their facility where they showcase their latest accomplishments. We will talk more about this in the next segment.

Part 2: Landers

On March 21, 2011, the RCSP Team got together for a technical discussion and progress update. There are a lot of activities taking place within the RCSP Team relating to the lander design and analysis. This includes structural modeling by Teledyne Brown. They have been doing amazing design work and extensive thermal modeling of the lunar environment and the effects temperature will play on thermally managing all the systems, from propulsion, to structural, to power, etc.

Mark Wall of Teledyne presented his cool thermal models that showed the temperature gradients as a function of time. Mike Soutullo discussed the structure prototypes for the lander. Chase Renegar of Dynetics presented the dual mode propulsion system we are building and testing that will soon take place. I talked with him today. They expect to hot-fire test our new “green” propulsion system next week.

We had Pete Paceley and Bobby Cohanim with Draper present on all the amazing GNC work they are pursuing and the related simulations they are running. They are also testing hardware in the loop with a cold gas system Bobby uses back at his lab.

We had a lot of other folks talking about their cool contributions as well. Mike Graves and Ray McCormick led the overall system discussion. They do a great job leading these efforts on the technical front.

Visit our website to learn more about our lander work: http://www.rocketcityspacepioneers.com/space/lunar-lander

Stay tuned: Next time, we will talk about fire and smoke, as well as moonscapes that are being built.