We had a great RCSP Team Meeting to discuss the overall progress of everything technical and not so much this week. We met on March 21st and discussed everything from marketing to all the cool technical stuff going on. We had our NASA ILDD customer join us via phone, as well as Marshall Space Flight Center technical representatives join us in person.

I need to start by saying we have made some incredible accomplishments on a few fronts and we have a great team! Mike Graves is our technical lead and Janet Felts spearheads the non-technical stuff. It is all important. This meeting highlighted everything and was slated to primarily be an open forum technical exchange.

Janet gave a great overview of the marketing taking place on a few fronts. Marketing includes all facets of social media and other formats as well. She and Jason Andrews of Andrews Space/Spaceflight Services have been working hard to get our new ad campaign kicked off so we can get folks really excited about “Rideshare” on the Falcon 9 and how our plan can save 50% off the cost of buying a dedicated launch vehicle. Jason updated us on the many potential rideshare and science customers inquiring about our opportunity.

There is so much to talk about and maybe I can best represent it in a three-part series. Rovers, Landers, and Moonscapes.

Part 1: Rovers

There are so many awesome rover activities taking place within the RCSP Team. Internal to Dynetics, we had Charles Tullock talk about the work with rovers he is doing with our team members like John Stingel and his students at the Huntsville Center for Technology. John brought out the rover his students built in the last few weeks. It was really cool. He said the students had been driving it around via ethernet as well as RF. John filled us in on the fact that Charles had new motors ordered that are better suited for the design, and pointed out that his versatile electronic architecture could easily configure to different drive motors, which is smart.

We have Andrews leading a rover design and they have built a prototype rover that they have been doing drive tests with. Jason and his team have been trading some new solar panel options and I found the discussion and drivers interesting.

We had Dr. Jovanov and Dr Fahimi, our UAHuntsville partners, talk about the cool software they have been developing for navigation and other systems. They have students doing amazing software algorithms to help us navigate while on the moon. This is not trivial stuff. There are many trades ongoing concerning wheels, suspension, drive systems, power and thermal management, etc.

Visit our website, http://www.rocketcityspacepioneers.com/space/space-rover, for a Rover Update with photos.

Stay tuned: Next time we will talk about landers and the imminent fire and smoke coming soon.