2011 was an exciting year for the Rocket City Space Pioneers. After entering the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition in September of 2010, things got extremely busy for RCSP and the team.  Dynetics, team leader, had  already joined with some outstanding team members, Andrews Space and Spaceflight Services, Draper Laboratory, Teledyne Brown Engineering, the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. By the end of the year, we had brought on board the Huntsville Center for Technology, Huntsville City Schools’ technical high school.

In 2011, we added Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Moog, and Analytical Mechanics Associates (AMA), making our team even stronger and more diverse.

Since joining the competition, we have made great progress with our lander and rover. As we’ve written about in earlier blogs, the students at the Huntsville Center for Technology are building a moonscape on which to test drive our rover and an Engineering Development Lander, a full-scale model of our lander.

NASA, through its Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) contract, selected us in October 2010 to supply flight component data to enable the development of future human and robotic lander vehicles and exploration systems. In September of this year, we completed a critical NASA contract milestone by delivering hot-fire test data on Dynetics’ newly developed “green” rocket engine.

The market for rideshare has proven to be challenging as we have tested our business case by soliciting rides on a Falcon 9 rocket to accompany our lander and rover on our mission. We continue to look for rideshare partners.

AMA developed a really cool game for the iPad for us recently.  Look for it in the next few days.

The State of Alabama, Siemens, and Solid Works have been great partners on the project, and we appreciate their support.

The Google Lunar X PRIZE competition gave Dynetics and other team members the opportunity to dip our toes in the waters of social media, something that some of us had done none to little of. It has been a great introduction to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more for businesses and organizations.

Our team has received local, national, and international media coverage, which has been very exciting and has helped team members brand themselves as commercial space companies.

Officials from Dynetics recently announced that the company will be performing work on Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch project, a huge commercial program that makes the company a larger player in the space business.

We look forward to another exciting year in 2012.  We will start out with a big educational announcement first quarter, so stay tuned!

Happy holidays to all from the Rocket City Space Pioneers!