UK Space Conference part 2
Part 1: http://cesy.livejournal.com/173972.html
The second talk I went to was by Prof Ken Pounds of Leicester University. He used to be the President of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Skylark sounding rocket was developed at RAE Farnborough. Ariel 1 was the first UK satellite, launched on a Delta rocket. Skylark was launched from Woomera, Australia. (Someone said later that there's some reason Woomera can't be used nowadays.)
Will Pomerantz of the X Prize Foundation was at Internation Space University before coming to the X Prize Foundation 3 years ago as Director of Space Projects. The X Prize was inspired by the Orteig Prize in 1927, where 9 teams spent 16 times the prize value. He gave us a brief history of other similar prizes and their successes. The X Prize had 26 teams, $10 million prize, over $100 million spent by the teams in 7 countries. SpaceShipOne was launched in 2004. Armadillo have done some good work towards the Google Lunar X Prize - 6 months from a scribble on a napkin to flying their lunar lander, and they did that twice, with two different designs, after their first design didn't win. An interesting bit of trivia - the US flag on the Moon was UV-sensitive, so is now just white. There's a team summit for the GLXP in Strasbourg, France on May 19-21, with a student competition on May 19th. The student competition involves teams turning up and being given a design challenge, and they have to produce a business and technical proposal to present at the end of the day. He mentioned the FredNet team, who are aiming to win the prize using an open-source method.
The second talk I went to was by Prof Ken Pounds of Leicester University. He used to be the President of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Skylark sounding rocket was developed at RAE Farnborough. Ariel 1 was the first UK satellite, launched on a Delta rocket. Skylark was launched from Woomera, Australia. (Someone said later that there's some reason Woomera can't be used nowadays.)
Will Pomerantz of the X Prize Foundation was at Internation Space University before coming to the X Prize Foundation 3 years ago as Director of Space Projects. The X Prize was inspired by the Orteig Prize in 1927, where 9 teams spent 16 times the prize value. He gave us a brief history of other similar prizes and their successes. The X Prize had 26 teams, $10 million prize, over $100 million spent by the teams in 7 countries. SpaceShipOne was launched in 2004. Armadillo have done some good work towards the Google Lunar X Prize - 6 months from a scribble on a napkin to flying their lunar lander, and they did that twice, with two different designs, after their first design didn't win. An interesting bit of trivia - the US flag on the Moon was UV-sensitive, so is now just white. There's a team summit for the GLXP in Strasbourg, France on May 19-21, with a student competition on May 19th. The student competition involves teams turning up and being given a design challenge, and they have to produce a business and technical proposal to present at the end of the day. He mentioned the FredNet team, who are aiming to win the prize using an open-source method.