Welcome to the second Fan Friday.

Today is YOUR day!

You ask and we reply, while also giving away some sneak a peek at what we are doing. If you want to take a look at the previous questions go to our blog.

From all submissions we chose 5 questions from three different categories this time.

Stats "How many Moons will pass till you get there?"

30 full moons and 31 new moons.

Tech "Do you use any gears transmissions in your drive system?"

We use Planetary Gears for Steering and Drive Motors. It's in a construction Kit from Maxxon Motor. The difficulty with space however is, that you need to take special care of certain things which don't matter on earth. For example some lubricants will vaporize almost immediately in space, another is that the missing oxygen can lead to cold welding. So designing the right motor for space is challenging, but fun. Read more here

Social "How do you keep in touch with your team?"

As our team is working across 5 continents and 10 countries, we utilize any means possible to stay in touch. Depending on the sub-team in question there are multiple favorits for example instant messengers or voice-over-ip (internet telephony) clients. For real-time voice communication we use the open source cross platform solution Mumble. Just recently our developers managed to cross-compile a stable release for our teams iPhone users. For video communication we're sticking to Skype and Microsoft LYNC.

Instant communication is handled by old school mailing lists and state of the Art Apps like WhatsApp.

Social "Will you be taking a mini figure to the moon?"

As of now we haven't put much thought into this. The official GLXP team guidelines, the so called Master-Team-Agreement (MTA), requires each team to take a roughly defined *secret* payload to the Moon. We can only guess it is going to be Larry Page and Sergey Bring action figures

Mike Doornbos from Evadot.com suggested that we should have some "Robert" and "Sebastian" Action Figures amongst other cool stuff in his last Podcast. Of course these would be awesome candidates as something to go to the moon as "minor payload fluctuations".

Tech "Will you be using recycled or especially eco-friendly materials?"

We have to admit that our current design doesn't aim to be especially eco-friendly. They're designed to withstand the harsh environment of the moon while being as light as possible to cut down the overall mission costs. However we greatly appreciate the work of companys like SpaceX who try to combine both efforts on building cost effective and eco-friend launch vehicles:

SpaceX: "... Falcon 9 will be the world’s first launch vehicles where all stages are designed for reuse. The Falcon 1 has a reusable first stage, but an expendable upper stage"

NASA Spaceflight: "SpaceX aims towards a fully re-usable Falcon 9"

As promised last FF...

we have counted the exact number of parts for our rovers. The R1 has 380 parts and the R2 1667 parts.

One more thing ...

We got the first submission for our Facebook Design contest!

WE INTRODUCE: OUR 1# FACEBOOK DESIGN CONTEST!

The brief: create a new "outfit" for our rover asimov and win one of our "Hell Yeah..." shirts! Just post your ideas on our facebook wall. In one week the most liked design wins. as an extra win, in near future we will imprint the winning design on one of our test-rovers! At the following link you can download our logo, a picture of asimov and for sure "Hell yeah, it's rocket science!". Much fun and good luck!

Cheers!

If we caught your attention, follow us on , or our Team Blog!

• Moon with airplane in front: NASA
• SpaceX Capsule: SpaceX.com/Mike Altenhofen