Staff Blog

The NASA Co-Lab, a group out of NASA Ames that looks for innovative ways for NASA both to outreach to the community and to collaborate with individuals outside of NASA's own employee and contractor base, holds a cool series of public events called "Luna Philosophie". Pretty much without fail, I am interested in the topics they discuss, but unable to attend in person.

The last Luna Philosophie featured a guest speaker -- Doug Comstock. I've gotten to know Doug relatively well through the NASA Centennial Challenges program, which falls under the Innovative Partnership Program (IPP) office, which Doug runs. In my opinion, IPP is running some of NASA's best, most important projects--but is also among the most-overlooked sections of NASA, by Congressional appropriators, at least. Doug and his team are doing great things both to carry forward the success of the various IPP programs and to raise the public awareness about them.

We've just released a new KMZ file that lets you explore the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge right from your laptop. Fly around to visit the teams all over the world, or check out the locations where they test fly all of their vehicles.

If you've got any good placemarks you'd like to see here, let us know! We'll be updating this feed as new content becomes available (don't worry, the content will refresh itself automatically, so no need to redownload). Stay tuned for more information about how the webcast of the challenge on October 24 and 25 will work.

You can download the file here.

As previously mentioned here on the Launch Pad, our friends over at Space Florida recently co-hosted an event for a potential pan-Floridian Google Lunar X PRIZE team called Omega Envoy. I wasn't able to attend the event myself--I was at Oshkosh at the time--but I got a quick recap of the event. Here's what I learned:

We've just released a new KML file that lets you explore the Google Lunar X PRIZE right from your laptop. Fly around to visit the teams all over the world, or check out the Allen Telescope Array from our preferred partner SETI Institute.

If you've got any good placemarks you'd like to see here, let us know! We'll be updating this feed as new content becomes available (don't worry, the content will refresh itself automatically, so no need to redownload). Stay tuned for geoblogs and maybe geotagged images as well!

Go here to download the KML.