Pretty cool. Four months is pretty fast - how large was the development team?
-Bob On 02/10/2015 09:22 PM, Ben Brockert wrote:
I was the propulsion/structural lead on another hovering rocket, this one for Moon Express: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAMPD65dvIY Concept to first flight in a bit under four months. It was built to match MoonEx's planned control scheme and so has a slightly unusual architecture, with one large fixed engine in the center and twelve fixed thrusters at different downward angles on the outside. Center thruster is monoprop peroxide (FMC "90%" which is actually 86.6% now), outer are nitrogen cold gas. It won a $1M "terrestrial milestone prize" from the Google Lunar X Prize. Astrobotic also won a $1M prize doing flights on Masten's Xombie, so rockets I helped create have now won $3.15M of prizes. It is not lost on me that this is an extremely odd thing to make money at. It is a bummer that good peroxide is so hard to get or I expect we'd see a lot more peroxide rockets on AR. If anyone is curious I'll look up the pricing on the FMC stuff. Ben