A week has gone by, with no earth-shattering events, really.
Team USST took a good first step towards catching up on their qualification by doing some testing at TRUMPF. No news is good news in that respect.
Team NSS is also making good progress, and I hope that so do the other teams. (I’ll know more after Sunday’s weekly team telechat)
The engineering folks at Dryden started manufacturing the replacement pulley – it was quickest to create a steel pulley of the same dimensions than it was to try to start from scratch. The pulley should be ready this week, in time for testing and flight next week.
Based on the experience gained at the last test flight, we did a new walk-through of the procedures, and made quite a few modification. The biggest one is that we’ll use a new cable for every helicopter flight. This saves us the time spent reeling it back in, and a new spool of cable is a lot cheaper than the 20-30 minutes of helicopter flight time it would have otherwise taken)
Because of schedule conflicts, the test flight was moved to the week of the 20th, so now laser testing and helicopter testing will happen concurrently. In another lesson learned, daily activities will begin at 5 am, to avoide the afternoon heat. This is sure to test my limits… I am not a morning person.
More soon.






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