The Rocket City Space Pioneers have been busy this month.

Steve Cook, Director of Space Technologies for Dynetics, presented three papers recently at the International  Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Naples, Italy.  One of the papers was entitled “Team Rocket City Space Pioneers – Progress Report on the Google Lunar X PRIZE Competition.”  This session was well-attended, and there was much interest in our mission.

Steve’s other topics were “FastSat Orbital Debris Removal Mission – An Affordable, Scalable and Responsive Flight Demonstration” and “Enabling an Affordable, Advanced Liquid Booster for NASA’s Space Launch System.”

NASA awarded Dynetics a contract earlier this month to perform the F-1 Engine and Structures risk reduction tasks for the Space Launch System Advanced Booster.

“Rocket City Renaissance Man” was the title given to the Space News Profile this week on Tim Pickens, Rocket City Space Pioneers Team Leader. That is an appropriate title, given his many accomplishments and endeavors.

Anyone who has followed Tim knows he has quite a collection of impressive garage-built projects that resulted from his creative, lean thinking. His philosophy is that anyone can have fun, and it doesn’t require a lot of money to do it.

That is in addition to his serious work, such as serving as lead propulsion designer on SpaceShipOne.

Tim is known as a bit of a “rock star” in the Space Community, with followers of all ages, something that makes him very appealing as a team leader. He has a natural ability to inspire people and uses that talent well in our educational outreach efforts.

Tim gave an update about the Rocket City Space Pioneers in the Space News article. This has been an exciting project for him from the beginning and has given him an opportunity to reach out even more to not only the Space Community, but to the general public as well.