The increased visibility due to the May 21, 2008 ISU and Team STELLAR press announcements has had a very positive impact on our
team-building efforts. Besides a full-page feature story in the primary Raleigh newspaper (News & Observer [1]) and other news websites around the state, the team was interviewed by Raleigh's NBC affiliate WNCN-TV, which aired the program on June 3rd.
This coverage has resulted in numerous phone calls and emails from local companies offering to volunteer their engineering services, and several retired Apollo-era engineers have also contacted us. And if you need a human interest story, try this: one of these engineers was a former 7th-grade classmate of Team STELLAR Executive Director Dick Dell. Imagine the headline: "Lunar competition reunites long-lost elementary school lunch-box buddies!"
Local university students have also taken an interest, and this has helped team member Andre Mazzoleni (Ph.D., P.E., Assoc. Professor, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, NCSU) recruit a team of recent graduates of the senior space systems design class who want to work on the rover this summer. Several of them have hands-on experience with rover design and construction.
The Raleigh lunar buzz has begun!
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