© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering To LunaCorp and beyond… LunaCorp was the first private space company. They had great plans to send unmanned and eventually manned missions to the Moon. The money model was to finance it through entertainment channels and possibly the sale of some data to interested parties, such as governments. For a number of years I served as the CTO of LunaCorp, and along with Jim Dunstan, helped create technology to make space exploration downright fun and accessible to everyone. We tended to serve as the magicians behind the curtain making the magic happen. Unlike a traditional Space mission where public participation involved switching to the correct channel and not switching away, LunaCorp had a number of ways to actually involve the public. One of the plans was to have driving stations at theme parks around the country where some lucky people would actually get to drive a Lunar Rover. The 3 second delay between sending a command and seeing the result made it a little trickier than just driving a radio control car. We built the delay option into one of the motion platform based Lunar driving simulators. It turned out that the 8 year olds were great at driving with a delay, but the older kids and adults needed a lot of practice. Unless they were helped by an 8 year old, then they got the hang of it much faster. In order to have been eligible to drive a real lunar rover, you would have had to get your driving license through one of the simulators. The Rovers were designed to be smart enough not to let someone hurt it, but without driver training, the rovers would have just gone around in circles. LunaCorp teamed up with the robotics department at Carnegie Mellon University to design the rovers. Nomad was one of the test beds, and spent a lot of time in the Atacama Desert in Chile. LunaCorp arranged for a satellite link between Chile and Pittsburgh so the rover could send real-time data home. With that data a bit of special software, we were able to control a motion platform so that a rider could feel every bump that the rover felt half a world away. After LunaCorp I kept in touch with some of the Space folk that I met along the way.  That has led to my current space project – a small satellite that will take a trip up to ISS sometime this year. Nanoracks LLC offers low cost, for space anyway, rides for small experiments. The Entropy1 web site has some information about the first satellite that I plan on launching. This is a test bed for the computer system, as well as a way to continue some of the experiments that we started using JP Aerospace High Altitude Balloons. More information will be posted over at Entropy1 as it becomes available.