With all of the recent space prize activity, I've been barely able to keep up, let alone post on all of the events. I just went through over 100 notifications in my email about prize news articles, blog posts, and so on. Whew! That takes a while, and it's only 1 information path.
My advice is to check sites like RLV News. You can see news on the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge events, the awards ceremony for the winners, and how some of the teams are continuing after the prize. If you follow this blog, you'll know some of the other sites to check, too. I'm not going to duplicate all of that, but I do have a few items I thought were interesting:
Masten Space Systems Wins NGLLC LII - Donna's Journey
Parting thoughts as the NGLLC fades to black - TrueZer0
Did Ask for a Photo? - Team Phoenicia
New Photo - Team Phoenicia
@unrocket - Starting Clean up from LLC my entropy maximization efforts got out of control. Started with my Primary computer,new 1Tb Hdrive, $69.00!
Here's a well-deserved vacation:
@wikkit: I saw two oceans and a gulf in one day. My new record. Wandered around Miami Beach a bit, tomorrow is more exploration here.
I made a couple canned twitter searches for the Lunar Lander Challenge (yes, uh, just in time). Actually, I think the teams will continue to be active in some way, so there will still be content there after the Challenge. The searches are at the top right of Space Prizes blog. There are 2 because Twitter seems to take its 140 character limit idea to its searches, too:
Lunar Lander Challenge Accounts
More Lunar Lander (Masten)
Happy Friday!
Wow, what an amazing past couple of weeks it has been here at X PRIZE.
The X PRIZE space team has just stepped back into the office after a trip to Washington DC for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge awards ceremony. The ceremony was great – a lot of smiles and great speeches from NASA, House Representatives, Teams Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace, and Peter Diamandis. There are a couple of summaries on the web of yesterday's events from some of the attendees:
- X PRIZE NGLLC09 Twitter account and photos from Twitpic
- Notes from Clark Lindsey, HobbySpace
- Chuck Divine's notes from the ceremony
I have many more thoughts about the conclusion of NGLLXPC, but will keep it short for now by saying that the results of this competition have proven to be very positive, and the success of these prizes bodes extremely well for possible funding of future space prizes.
Many, many thanks are in order. There are countless people who have been involved over the years with the NGLLXPC and contributed to it’s success. So today, for Friday Fun Day, we want to celebrate all of the people who have been interested in and supportive of this competition.
For the FFD activity, we would love to see photos or hear about memories that you all have had over the years from NGLLXPC. Did you attend the X PRIZE Cup and watch Armadillo’s “Pixel” fly? See TrueZer0’s debut into the competition? Hear Will singing on this year’s webcast?
Send us photos or tell us about your favorite NGLLC moments!
You can post them here, send via Twitter (@glxp), or post to the GLXP Facebook page.
To get you started, here are a couple of photos that I dug up from my computer...
October 2008, Armadillo wins Level I, First Place at Las Cruces International Airport, NM. Peter Diamandis congratulating John Carmack after the team successfully returned to the starting line.
The Armadillo "Pixel" vehicle at X PRIZE Cup 2006:
Happy Friday Fun Day!
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From @cariann:
"One of my fav NGLLC memories: When I asked @revrev (Mike Fabio) to string some cable because I had just painted my nails. HA! (He did it!)"
The official press release for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge was released yesterday. The official standings were as follows:
The Awards Ceremony will be taking place on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at the Rayburn House in Washington, D.C. starting at 11:45am EST/16:45 UTC. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and Director of NASA Centennial Challenges, Doug Comstock, will be speaking at the event. Representatives of Team Masten Space Systems and Team Armadillo Aerospace will be in attendance to accept the awards.
Live updates from the event will be posted on Twitter: @ngllc09 or search for hashtag #ngllc.
In addition to the canned twitter search I mentioned earlier today, hashtags are also useful. However, not everyone uses them - they may not know about them or remember them at the right time. In the case of the Space Elevator Games, it looks like the following 2 hashtags are being used by some (but not all) accounts participating in, or following, the Games:
#TPNASA
#segames
Some twitter accounts using these:
EENugent (related to Tom? I don't know)
MKKare (related to Jordan? I don't know)
b0yle (Alan Boyle, MSNBC.com science editor)
spaceelevator (Space Elevator Reference)
As a result, I made another Space Elevator Games twitter search with these tags:
Space Elevator Games Accounts and Tags
This search is also at the top right of the Space Prizes blog. At the moment the search gives 5 or 6 pages of tweets from the last 24 hours, and the main event hasn't started yet. Here's one that gives background on the games and some ways to follow them:
b0yle: Another $2 million NASA-backed contest ramping up, this one for laser-powered, cable-climbing robots: http://bit.ly/3NKgkI (expand) ... #segames
The Space Elevator Blog had some posts today, too, in spite of what I'm sure is a lot of other work to get ready for the Games. In addition to the status of the setup, there's a lot of information in these posts on how to follow the games:
Status - doing a dry run…
Dry run; so far, so good
No more video today
Re-installing rotor blades on a helicopter
The setup for the 2009 Space Elevator Games Climber/Beam Power competition is already happening, with the main event starting tomorrow.
Payload... - The Space Elevator Blog
Current Status (11/1) from Space Elevator Games: Completed first day of setup at Dryden, and all is well. First games day is Wednesday, though a potential schedule change might prompt us to squeeze in a few climbs on Tuesday. Putting finishing touches on live coverage screen (above) - stay tuned!
Happy Halloween - The Space Elevator Blog - This one is obviously a few days old. Among other things, it gives a twitter account for @USST, one of the 3 remaining teams this year.
Speaking of twitter, I'm in the process of setting up some canned twitter searches for various space prizes, prize organizations, and more. Right now they're at the top right of the Space Prizes blog, although I might eventually move them to the Space Prizes twitter pseudo-blog. There's a canned search for Space Elevator Games Twitter Accounts at the top of the list - that's one of the (hopefully) finished ones. At any rate, it includes tweets from the Space Elevator Games twitter accounts I know about. It's easy enough to adjust the search using Twitter's search engine once you click on the canned search (eg: if you want to search for more than just those accounts, or tweets based on messages "to:" those accounts, or the string "power beaming challenge"). Here are some recent Space Elevator Games tweets from yesterday:
NASAPrize: Preparations underway for Power Beaming Challenge this week! Competition scheduled for Nov 4 & 5
LaserMotive: Lunch on the lakebed. http://yfrog.com/emfy6j
SEGames: status: Horizontal laser test now occurring. KCSP first up, then LaserMotive and then USST.
LaserMotive: Current temp and humidity. http://yfrog.com/dyp5gj
USST: We've made arrangments to hopefully pickup a new antennae from the factory in LA today. Hopefully we can get back in time with traffic.
SEGames: Go to http://live.spaceelevatorgames.org for latest pix.
