Wednesday was originally planned as a combination helicopter operations contingency day and laser testing “start early” day. Since the forecasted storm indeed pushed the helicopter operation into Wednesday, we’ll be starting the laser testing operation on Thursday – so time is short.
Luckily, the TRUMPF laser truck has been in position since Wednesday – led by TRUMPF’s ops man Dave Marcotte, the TRUMPF crew (Mark Cornish, Alexander Sauter, Tom Osesek) stormed their trailer on Tuesday morning and had the system comissioned and ready to lase in about 4 hours… We had to wait till Wednesday to stage them to the laser range (at the far end of the lakebed) and so by Thursday morning it was pretty much plug-and-play.
The image below is of the TRUMPF laser delivering 8 kWatt of photonic power to the Kansas City Space Pirates beam director trailer. What the picture doesn’t show is the condition this laser is working in – sitting in the baking heat of the Mojave desert, dust in the air, wind blowing – not exactly your typical environment for precision optical equipment.
The connections to the KCSP trailer, btw, include the main fiber optic (yellow), clean air, utility power, clean water, emergency stop, beam-off command, and power level command – full service indeed!
TRUMPF is supporting four of our teams – the Kansas City Space Pirates, USST, University of Michigan, and National Space Society.
More on each of the teams coming soon.






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

