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Team Member Profile: Margaret (Margo) Ratcliff

LunaTrex — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:17:12 -0700

Greetings from Margo Ratcliff!I graduated with a B.S. from Tulane University (New Orleans, LA.) and a M.S. from Texas A&M University (College Station, TX.). Both of my degrees are in Mechanical Engineering. I previously worked in California for seven years in the aircraft industry, two years in Mississippi in the rocket industry, and two years in Indiana for the consumer products industry. In 2005, I became an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering Technology at Purdue University – College of Technology – Columbus, Indiana. Currently, I am also an affiliate professor for the pre-engineering program, Project Lead the Way. While at Purdue, I’ve encouraged students to design, build, and test devices for our different classes. We’ve designed, built, and tested the following: projectile motion devices for Dynamics classes, a pulse jet engine for Thermodynamics class, and a high altitude UAV with a telescopic wing for Independent Study class. For our UAV project, we worked with resources and technical guidance from Gevers Aircraft, Inc. In the fall of 2008, I will switch gears and become a full time Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. I am already working with Dr. Khalid Lafdi’s Carbon group at the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI). We are studying the mechanical and thermal characteristics of different nanofluids. I am also working with the University of Dayton Advanced Rocket Team (UDART) to build and test a student rocket. Airbuoyant, Inc. and Team LunaTrex are our current sponsors and they are providing us with the resources to build and test the rocket.

I hope to contribute to Team LunaTrex with my mechanical engineering knowledge and background, a good attitude, and some great drive. I would love to see some versatile, cost-effective, useful technologies leave our LunaTrex door. As a team, I think we can accomplish many unique things - anything is possible at this point.

From Pete Bitar: There would be no Team LunaTrex without Margo. She is the "glue" that brought most of us together, and has a heart of caring and of gold, beyond her intellect, drive, professionalism, and passion.

Thanks for Sharing, Margo.

Hometown Paper Features Quantum3 Founder

Quantum3 — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:23:15 -0700

Quantum3 founders Courtney Stadd, Paul Carliner and Liam Sarsfield were featured in the Bethesda Business Gazette, a newspaper based in Stadd's hometown of Bethesda, Maryland.

Clink the link below for the story:

http://www.gazette.net/stories/050908/businew182942_32355.shtml

Team member profiles coming soon

LunaTrex — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:14:19 -0700

Team LunaTrex will be starting a small series of member profiles in the next few weeks. You'll get a chance to meet some of the core members of the Team and get a feel for their backgrounds and passion for this mission.

Please stay tuned!

Pete

Rover-Lander

Astrobotic — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:46:31 -0700

Rover-lander

This is a classic departure test with disconnect, dismount, and roll-off

Camera Mast

Astrobotic — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:31:53 -0700

Camera Mast

Cameras, pan-tilt, mast, and cable routing are art more than technology. These are subtle brain-teasers.

Motor Control Board

Astrobotic — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:19:23 -0700

Motor Control Board

This driver controls locomotion actuators. The version shown here is a terrestrial package that has a space-rated counterpart

Deale's Man in the Moon

Quantum3 — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:33:06 -0700

Quantum3 cofounder and senior vice president Liam Sarsfield was featured in The Capital, his hometown daily newspaper published in Annapolis, Maryland.

Read the article here:

www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/04_28-10/CSC

-- posted by Rachel MacKnight, Quantum3 communications director

Camera and Propulsion System Design at the Southern California Selene Group

SCSG — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:05:13 -0700

The Southern California Selene Group is continuing with its engineering and design work. Since my last blog report, we’ve had two very productive all-hands team meetings on Saturday, March 22 and Saturday, April 19, and we have another scheduled for May 10. (By the way, I’ve just put up a new photo album on our team page, showing pictures from our last three team meetings.) In between, as always, there are lots of smaller meetings going on – for example, at least once a week, Harold meets with Ron, Dorian, Robert, Al, Brian, Dan and others to go over key design issues.

Also, I’d like to mention that Harold’s brother Ben Rosen (former venture capitalist) has a blog, where he wrote a humorous and clever post about Harold’s pursuit of the Google Lunar X PRIZE. You can read the blog at: http://benrosen.com. The title of the blog post is “Spin Me to the Moon” dated 25 March 2008.

We are happy to announce the addition of three new team members: Phil Donatelli (he was just advising us before), Daniel Geng and Patty Pun. Their impressive bios can be read on our team web pages. We also have a new honorary member, six year old Lucas.

OUR HONORARY MEMBER. Lucas came to us by way of his mother Courtney, who contacted the X PRIZE Foundation, writing that her six year old son had a design for a moon rover, and asked if someone there could forward her letter to our team. Will Pomerantz did just that. To make a long story short, after much back-and-forth correspondence, we were finally able to meet with Lucas and his mother -- both delightful people. Lucas brought along the paper that had his rover design. Once he started talking, you could see that this was no ordinary child. He explained to Harold how the solar panels worked, and how the batteries would provide power during the new moon phase. Curious (and amazed!) at his abilities, we asked him lots of questions. It was amazing how much he knew, and seemed to understand. The one that blew us away was when we asked him what caused the seasons (it’s a sad fact that many adults don’t know the answer to this question). He thought for a moment, tilted his head, and said “well, it is due to the angle of the earth…” (!!)

Lucas and his mother Courtney, along with his younger sister Cate (at three, she is too young to join our team:-) stopped by towards the end of our most recent team meeting on April 19. Many of the team members were therefore able to meet Lucas, and interact with him. Al Wittmann discussed with Lucas some of the design decisions we had made at the meeting. Lucas followed what Al was saying closely, and asked relevant questions (often he was gently and unobtrusively guided by his very smart mother). Then, after Lucas mentioned the “Saturn VEE” (of course! why would he know about Roman numerals?), Rex Ridenoure showed him some pictures of rockets, as well as the Saturn V, that he had on his computer. We all enjoyed welcoming our honorary team member.

Now, back to design issues. Major design progress has occurred in two key areas: the camera system, and the propulsion system.

CAMERA SYSTEM AND ELECTRONICS. Harold has been working with Brian Bliss and our new team members Dan Geng and Patty Pun to finalize the electronics and design of our camera system. To meet all the Mooncast requirements, we wanted to create a camera system from commercially available components. We need this camera system to be high up in order to get good viewing (looking downward) of the top of the spacecraft, as well as (looking outward) of the distant lunar surface. So we decided from the start to locate the camera system at the top of the mast – the highest point of our lander. The design challenge was to make this fit within our stringent mass and volume constraints. We have also designed the appropriate mechanisms to provide the pan, tilt and focus adjustments needed to meet the Mooncast requirements. Our detector will be a single focal plane array whose associated electronics provides the versatility for the required self-portrait detailed images, near real time video, and high definition video – meaning, these various specified modes are provided electronically.

We like this simple and elegant design.

PROPULSION SYSTEM. Since my last blog post when I discussed propulsion design issues, we’ve gone through several design iterations regarding our propulsion system. (In fact, before reading further, you might want to re-read that blog post to review the issues involved.) We have now converged on a configuration that appears optimum: it’s a blowdown bipropellant system, with a hybrid descent system consisting of a solid retro-rocket significantly augmented by liquid propulsion thrusters.

Of course, the selection of this configuration is contingent on the timely availability (we don’t yet have complete data from the manufacturers) of the requisite thrusters and the particular solid rocket we have in mind. Also, this configuration has a slightly higher center of mass, and we haven’t yet been able to confirm its compatibility with this particular still-unpublished Falcon 1e launch vehicle requirement. With these caveats in mind, let me explain how we got to this choice.

SpaceX recently issued its new Falcon Lunar Capability Guide, and this proved to be good news for us, since the Falcon 1e is now shown to provide a higher mass capability into low Earth orbit. This affects the design decision of bipropellant vs. monopropellant. We had wanted to go with a bipropellant before because of the potential performance improvements provided by its higher specific impulse, but the original lower mass capability advertised for the Falcon 1e made this problematic. This is because the dry mass of the bipropellant system is much higher than that of a monopropellant system and, under the original constraints, that factor outweighed its specific impulse advantage. With the new numbers for the Falcon 1e, the balance has shifted. Our spacecraft design now readily accommodates the use of a bipropellant system.

The blowdown system has long been desired by us for its relative simplicity, but it necessarily occupies more volume. We looked carefully at this, but couldn’t fit it into our volume constraints if we used an all-liquid blowdown descent system. So we decided to go back and look at re-incorporating the solid retro-rocket. We found that we could do this by using a hybrid descent rocket system – meaning, a system where the solid rocket provides roughly two-thirds of the delta V required for the descent, while the other one-third is provided by the liquid propellant thrusters. This combination results in significantly lower “gravity loss” during the descent phase than was possible with the all-liquid descent system. (“Gravity loss” is the additional delta V required for descent, as compared to an ideal system that has infinite thrust.)

So, with less liquid propellant needed for the descent portion, the blowdown liquid tank volume can be smaller, making for an easier fit. This is great – we can now use the blowdown system.

While we still won’t have a known, fixed mass to decelerate before the solid rocket burns, the fact that after it burns, roughly a third of the delta V required for the descent is provided for by the liquid thrusters means that it is still much more “forgiving” of descent timing errors than our original system had been.

As Harold puts it, this overall combination (a blowdown bipropellant system, with a hybrid descent) provides the best performance, characterized by the “highest landed mass (excluding the propulsion system).”

OTHER MATTERS. Dorian has been in Europe for most of the month on business-related travel. In addition to all his other team work, Ron Symmes has been working various facilities issues, and since I last wrote, he had arranged for him and Harold to visit three such sites. Ron’s getting it all in place so that we will be ready to start building our spacecraft as soon as we have our funding in place. Well, in truth we will be able to start some construction even before that! We are getting lots of offers of free help. The network of helpful friends and colleagues that Harold and Ron (it seems that Ron knows everyone) have amassed over the years is truly gratifying.

TEAM SUMMIT. I will be representing our team at the Team Summit to be held in Strasbourg on May 20 and 21.

Deborah Castleman
Associate Team Leader

Lunar Zoning

Loretta.Whitesides — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:46:07 -0700

When you talk to people about the moon, some people get excited about creating a human settlement, others see a perfect place for lunar mining, and still others see the perfect place to put a radio telescope on the moon's far side, shielded from all the electromagnetic 'noise' that earthlings are pumping out every day.

It doesn't take long to realize that there will need to be some way to play air traffic control for all of these different groups and their diverse needs.

For example, the astronomers see the back side of the moon as a precious haven of electromagnetic quiet. Now, if a settlement were to grow on the near side of the moon and they wanted to have an orbiting communication system to allow them to talk to other explorers, robots, and settlements- they might put up a series of communications satellites. If we are not careful or if no one is keeping track of what all the different lunar "user groups" are up to we could have situations that just dont work.

Consider, three zippy little communications satellites put up around the moon could easily interfere with the astronomy needs of a user group that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to get their lunar telescope built. That is just one example of how groups could impinge on each other.

Luckily there could be a technological solution. If lunar communications systems switched to optical communications for example, sending 1's and 0's as individual photons, maybe that could make a huge difference. If the two user groups are working together, I am sure we can work it out.

In the end we really need to think about the whole moon and coming up with a model that allows people to fulfill on what they are there to accomplish. I think that having this process publically will give us an opportunity to raise the profile of private spaceflight and demonstrate that we have learned something from living on Earth.

New Rocket Motors Running VERY Well

rpspeck — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:05:08 -0700

Micro-Space accomplished its first “Hot Fire Test” in our upgraded test facility today. As noted previously, this setup allows much of the flight qualified hardware to be tested in an integrated configuration. This includes fuel level monitors for preflight and inflight monitoring, a new, lightweight ignition system, and a system to enhance the reliability of our motors in “Rapid Restart” situations. The instrumented thrust range has also been tripled to allow testing higher thrust motors, and the fuel system has been reconfigured to make the documentation of consumed fuel mass more accurate. The bipropellant systems have also been configured for more rapid loading, and expeditious unloading of fuel (the later is required for NGLL flight operations, so that the vehicle can be transported safely after a scrubbed flight).

Today's test in many ways repeated a previous test with a slightly modified motor design. Again, the motor started immediately and came up smoothly to the intended thrust. With different illumination, this is the first time that we have been able to see (and photograph) clear “Mach Diamonds” in our nearly transparent exhaust jet. The “Diamond” spacing responded as predicted to throttling and our motors again demonstrated more than a 5 to 1 throttled thrust range.

Predictable thrust with this new production motor, combined with excellent ignition and smooth throttling leave no propulsion problems for our “NG Lunar Lander” competitor. We will be defining our delivered ISP more accurately soon, but it is already sufficient for our planned, 90 second hover Lander. Good results with this new production batch of motors already gives us sufficient thrust, from a small cluster of motors, for our HTS (Human Transport System). Tests of this could come as little as two months after flight testing of the “NG Lunar Lander”. As previously noted, since these propulsion systems use storable fuels (Hydrogen Peroxide and Methyl Alcohol) they can also be used on the Moon for the Google Prize, and for the “Lunar Transfer” flight from LEO.

The thrust vectoring we use for control is already operational for the flight ready vehicle, as are the accelerometer and gyro subsystems. We have done extensive modeling of the “Hover” control dynamics, and of course this effort builds on our analysis and successful flight of three “Finless”, near hover guided rockets more than a decade ago. Much system's integration work remains to be done of course. Very soon we will start posing new Video of Tests on YouTube.