June 9 MultiPost

I'm pressed for time today (this may happen more and more often as that Lion King Circle of Life thing goes around), so I'm going to compress my posts:

From the X PRIZE Foundation news ticker: Commentary: Moore's vs. Newton's Laws - Mobile Handset Design Line - While considering the Google Lunar X PRIZE, Electrical Engineers marvel at the progress that's been made in electronics while rocketry has more or less stood still. Are the fundamental causes differences in physics and chemistry as the editorial implies, or are they differences in industrial structure, marketing, government policy, media, finance, and regulation?

Latest from the Kansas City Space Pirates - Space Elevator Blog - Progress on several fronts is described, but the familiar problem of finances shows itself again.

Briefs: The Space Show this week; Unreasonable paperwork - RLV News - In the spirit of paving the regulatory path for rocketeers of the future, Unreasonable Rocket will be publishing their Lunar Lander Challenge FAA again when it's complete.

The 16th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition happened on May 30 - June 2 in Rochester, Michigan. I haven't found a general summary of the event, but here are some IGVC sites from Chicago EDT (lots of pictures), University of Detroit ("victory is ours") and Princeton. The Princeton site notes:

PAVE is very proud to announce that our participation in the 2008 IGVC competition has been extremely successful. We have won the following awards:

- 6th Place Autonomous Challenge (lane-following / obstacle avoidance)
- Completed JAUS Challenge (ability to communicate over the DoD’s standard message protocol for unmanned systems)
- 4th Place Navigation Challenge (GPS waypoint-following / obstacle avoidance)
- 1st Place Design Challenge (based on technical paper, oral presentation and robot inspection)
- Rookie of the Year
- 3rd Place overall (out of 47 teams)

Google Lunar X PRIZE Twitter - You'll see lots of micro-posts here, including notes about X PRIZE Foundation and Lunar X PRIZE YouTube and Web Site design changes in progress, software gadgets, links to the latest news, etc.