Dropping the Vehicle in Utah

Written by Tom Nugent on Monday, November 5th, 2007

As promised, here is a video (courtesy of Dan from the Space Pirates!) of our vehicle on our treadmill test rig in Utah. We’d made some modifications and were testing the braking systems right before going to do the indoor qualification (this was Wednesday, 10/17).

We hadn’t had much practice with the mechanical brake, and as you can see in the video, the first time we pull up the vehicle, it then promptly free-falls back to the base. It scared us for a few minutes, but the vehicle was very robust and survived the fall without a problem! Then we practiced getting the brake right, and ran things up a number of times. At the end, we’re all heading off to do the indoor qualifying run.