I'm finally getting to my Part 3 blog on our moonscape effort. And I want to give an update on our fire and smoke progress. We have done some preliminary engine testing for our new lander engine. We are running a little behind on getting the really cool hot-fire test off. This is the way testing goes sometimes. In Alabama, the weather can always move schedules to the right. This is that time of year where we can have tornadoes and thunderstorms weekly! Technical challenges are the other side of the equation in the space business. All and all, things are progressing.

Part 3 Moonscape
I visited the Huntsville Center for Technology (HCT) on Thursday and got to interact with students and instructors. The students have been designing and building the coolest moonscape. We decided a few months ago that we needed a place to test our hardware that is ultimately bound for the moon. The moonscape needed to offer the ability to control lighting, surface texture, crater inclination, boulders, etc.

This was actually the recommendation that came to us from our Engineering Meets Education volunteers who just happened to work on the original lunar rovers, Ron Creel and Ortho “Skeet” Vaughn.

HCT had a large workshop with 30-foot ceilings where we could build a 30x10 moonscape that would serve our purpose. Students in Mike Evans class are in the process of constructing large portable floors that can be configured to meet our testing needs.

They showed me big sub-floors built out of lumber, plywood, and Styrofoam. In about the next month, HCT expects to have the moonscape floor ready for testing.

This moonscape will be used for rover navigation testing, navigation obstacle avoidance, etc. Imagine doing a weekend mission where you have to drive from Point A to Point B on the moonscape from a remote-operated computer without having access to those test areas. Also, imagine doing lunar-ascent testing with our lander in order to understand the effects of example a hard landing with a translation and how the vehicle managed things like tipping loads. Imagine using the landscape to not only do a touchdown with our lander, but also to deploy the rover and do a communication test between the rover and the lander.

These are just a few of the mission scenarios that we will be able to emulate.

Stay tuned for more fire and smoke updates and photos on the website, www.rocketcityspacepioneers, on our progress in all of these areas.