Saturday, June 25, 2011

Prize Roundup: Heinlein Prize, International Rocketry Challenge, CanSat winners, SEDS Conference, More

Heinlein Prize Honors Elon Musk of SpaceX - Heinlein Prize Trust

06/16/2011: Swing Test - SpeedUp

NASA And DARPA Offer Students Chance To Support Future Missions - NASA - This is for the Zero Robotics competition using floating SPHERES platforms on the International Space Station

The CanSat Competition has posted their 2011 Competition Winners and 2011 Cansat Photos.  Also, the 2012 mission has already been identified: Mission: Planetary Atmospheric Entry Vehicle.

Raytheon has a number of posts about the International Rocketry Challenge at the International Paris Air Show.  You can see all of them at their 2011 Paris Air Show - Team America Rocketry Challenge tag.  The most recent post is Raytheon-Sponsored Texas High School Team Wins International Rocket Fly-Off at Paris Air Show.

Northrop Grumman Announces Student Winners of Fourth Annual Engineering Scholars Program for Woodland Hills Facility - SpaceRef

SEDS Space Vision 2011 - RLV News - The early Speakers list for the conference includes a number of people with prize connections: Bill Nye (Executive Director of the Planetary Society, which has held a number of space competitions like the Apophis Mission Design Competition and numerous contests with themes like space art and mission names), Robert Richards (a Google Lunar X PRIZE competitor), Will Pomerantz (formerly of the X PRIZE Foundation), Jon Goff (who was part of the winning Masten Space Systems Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge team), and Ben Brockert (also from the Masten NG-LLC team, and now a member of another prize-winning NG-LLC team, Armadillo Aerospace).

Team Phoenicia sells first engine - RLV News

Briefs: Masten intern jobs; Langley lifting body event; Bruce Cordell interview - RLV News

White Label Space starts testing engines - RLV News

The next 2 links are from @ChallengeGov:

Now this is a cool ride! - The White House Blog discusses the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V).

The latest International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge opened on May 31. 

A TEA Party organization called TEA Party in Space has a platform that includes the following plank:

NASA shall use competitions and prizes whenever feasible to stimulate the private sector, including individual American inventors, to achieve innovative and affordable solutions to technological challenges.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Prize Roundup: Counting Craters, Earth Day Videos, Rockets, Asteroids, Sample Return Rules

NASA Requires Source Code from Robot Challenge Entrants - Robotic Trends on the Sample Return Robot Challenge

Draft Rules Feedback - WPI responds to some of the concerns from their comments sections and articles like the Robotic Trends one.

Earth at the Movies - NASA Earth Observatory on the 2011 NASA Earth Day Video Contest with the theme The Home Frontier (link via NASA Watch)

Caltech Space Challenge: Mission to an Asteroid - California Institute of Technology - Two groups of students will participate in a workshop and compete to design a mission to an asteroid or comet.  Here is more information about the workshop.

The Second NTL Marathon Match Challenge - NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) - This competition will be to develop algorithms to automatically detect craters from remote sensing images.  The winners of the previous challenge, the Planetary Data System Idea Challenge, were announced recently.

College rocket teams competing in Utah contest - RLV News

Materials wizard wins $500,000 prize - Cosmic Log

Monday, June 06, 2011

Sample Return Review, Unreasonable Perspective, Rover Challenge Results, EuSEC Teams, Armadillo Test

NASA’s new robot challenge - The Space Review - Ben Brockert discusses the Sample Return Robot Challenge.

Armadillo SuperMod test at full-throttle - RLV News - Ben also shows what Armadillo Aerospace is doing.  You can see more from Armadillo in other recent RLV News posts.

Unreasonable UAV aerial videography - RLV News - Continuing the coverage of former Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge teams, Unreasonable Rocket gives a view of a rocket launch that somehow reminded me of the trailer for the new X-Men movie.

Here are a few links for the 2011 University Rover Challenge:

The Results Are In!
2011 University Rover Challenge Concludes in Utah
Photos -> URC 2011

EuSEC announces competitors - The Space Elevator Blog

We-Are-Space video contest extended to June 14th - Space for All