Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Falcon 1 Launch, GLXP Updates, Unreasonable Progress, Bridge and Seasteading Designs, ISPCS Spaceport America Tour, Beam Power, Supersonic Designs

The Launch Pad from the X PRIZE Foundation features some big news:

Congratulations, SpaceX - This covers the first successful Falcon 1 launch with a customer satellite, as well as the possible implications for Google Lunar X PRIZE teams looking for a ride.
Caution: May Cause Drooling - This includes the first untethered Unreasonable Rocket test flight, Omega Envoy Devon Island testing, and FREDNET Nanosat work.

RLV News has much more on the Falcon 1 and Unreasonable stories, most recently including:

Unreasonable untethered rocket videos
RazakSAT satellite is working; Falcon I launch comments

In the Going to FAR post (I still like that title!), there were 4 Unreasonable projects on the agenda, and first free flight was the 2nd part of the 3rd item in the priority list. Does this mean that all those earlier projects were also finished on this trip as well?

Links: New GE Enterprise, My Location, Fossett Crash Report, Bridge Winners - Google Earth Blog - Here's the prize part of that post on amazing bridge models combined with satellite imagery:

3D Bridge Winners - Google has announced the winners of their build a 3D bridge contest. Watch an HD Video of the winning bridges.

2009 Competition Results - Google SketchUp

Although this contest didn't require Google SketchUp, it did recommend it:

Seasteading ~ "Float Cities" Design Competition!
- Maximizing Progress
Seastead Design Contest: Winning Entries The Seasteading Institute

Interestingly, the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight has a "Hard Hat" tour of Spaceport America scheduled for Friday, October 23.

NASA Names College Winners in Supersonic Design Contest - SpaceRef

From the Space Elevator Blog:

The human side of the Games
Team LaserMotive

@segames - New testing and Games schedule now posted at www.spaceelevatorgames.org. More coming soon!

Status Update - The Space Elevator Games