We’re headed for our first meeting at NASA Dryden today – our new proposed venue. Our group includes Ted Semon (The Space Elevator Blog guy), Keith Mackey (Our Helicopter Guru), Dave Marcotte (TRUMPF’s Laser Guru) Andy Petro (Our Boss at NASA Centennial Challenges) and yours truly.
It’s a five hour drive for me from home, which is nice, but everyone else flew in – Florida to Chicago.
I’m excited - not far from here is the Mojave Airport, where about 5 years ago Burt Rutan launched his SpaceShipOne to win the X-PRIZE. We drove down here in an RV to watch all three space shots, and the buzz and atmosphere were ab excellent demonstration of what powerful tools technology challenges are can be.
The circle is complete (obi-wan), I guess.
We’re here to meet with John Kelly, the director of Exploration at Dryden, who proposed Dryden as a possible site for the games. We’ve got one meeting set up with the management board, and one meeting with the engineering group. The goal is to explain what we want to do, get them excited over the project, and show that we’ve got enough planned already that we can perform the games safely. Nothing to it.
Above is an aerial view of Dryden and the dried lake-bed that’s next to it. Notice to amazing doodles in the sand – the landing strips, and the compass rose – almost a mile in diameter! A convenient way for a disoriented test-pilot in a rocket plane to get his bearing… As Vern said - this is sooo hard-core 50’s. cool.
If things go well, I’ll propose to locate the games right at the compass rose, if that’s possible.
To read more: see the official Dryden site, the wikipedia page, or just go see for yourself.
We’re linking up and staying the night in Lancaster, and will head over to the base (Dryden is inside Edwards Air Force base) bright and early tomorrow morning. John arranged for a tour of the new CEV being designed and built by NASA – an extra treat!
More tomorrow then, after we get back to the hotel.






For the obvious reasons, I invariably get too busy to blog exactly when things get interesting...
