As announced previously, Micro-Space's new production motors and associated systems are running very well. The thrust vector control systems on our landers are also running nicely. (We actually have three sets of the basic lander propulsion hardware finished. One of these is assembled with our HTS (Human Transport System) frame. This frame eliminates most of the lander's framework mass, relying on the strength of the pressurized fuel tanks to carry most of the loads.

We are close to Tethered Hover flight tests. However in preparation for this we are finishing both our “Hardware in the Loop” flight simulator and the computer data acquisition system which will be used during both the flight tests and the simulations. The use of identical hardware for these two purposes will make it much easier to evaluate the accuracy of the simulation's predictions.

The “Hardware in the Loop” simulator uses the flight ready “Motor Bar Assembly” with its thrust vector servo motors. The instantaneous position of each motor is measured and used to generate a thrust vector in the 6 Degree of Freedom simulator. This eliminates both the very difficult (usually imprecise), computer modeling of the nonlinear servo mechanism's response, and the major effort to quantify and evaluate these rate limited operations to obtain a usable result. The flight ready hardware, and position sensors, replace this difficult simulation with real data.

A few variants of this simulation setup will be used. The Throttling system will be tested using flowing water to test both the manual and autonomous altitude control modes. The thrust vector data will similarly be used to simulate both human flight efforts and and test the “Stability Augmentation” electronics.

A switch in the simulator electronics will change from the dynamics of hovering in Earth's gravity, to an accurate simulation of operations in the Moon's lower gravity. This generally improves the stability, since it makes control events happen in relative “Slow Motion” (with a 2.5x increase in the time required for maneuvers). Advanced control system designers know, however, that a decrease in feedback forces can destabilize a sophisticated control system just as an increase in feedback forces usually does.