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I want to give huge thanks to Owen Kindig of Ztoryteller not only for making the great video, but for his hard work, dedication, and creativity.

UPDATE: The Senate version of the NASA authorization bill passed.

Many thanks to Owen Kindig of Ztoryteller for his awesome work in creating this video.

I really should have made and uploaded this video months ago. It was only the tech symposium at NASA that drove me to make it, and now we can share it with you!

I’ve combined and synced the two videos. “Vomitrocious” is how some people described them individually. See what you think when they’re combined (but be warned, the spinning might make you a bit dizzy)!

Ben Shelef, organizer of the Power Beaming competition, blogged about stress testing going on at the competition site (Dryden Flight Research Center) this week:

It is always difficult to place your project into a stress test – you poured your heart and soul into it, and all you really want to do is protect it and treat it gently so it doesn’t break… Which is of course silly – you should test your brakes in an empty parking lot, not in the middle of traffic.

As part of our preparation for those tests (which are themselves preparation for the actual competition), we’ve been doing a number of tests, including dropping the vehicle (on purpose, this time) down the cable onto our bottom bumper. We were a bit nervous about it before the test, but this test and many others went pretty well:

As you can see, the structure is very robust, despite being engineered to be lighter than our previous entry. The climber vehicle will undergo other testing at the competition site (Dryden) this week to evaluate its mechanical robustness. We don’t know if the Dryden safety personnel will have any concerns, but this video shows that descending the cable shouldn’t be too much of a safety concern, mechanically speaking. We’ll find out this week if anything else is of concern. While some of our team is at Dryden for those tests, the rest of us are preparing for yet more tests of our own here at our shop.

There are always more tests one can do when developing a new system, especially one like ours that is so different from what’s been done before. During one recent test, we ran our lasers at high power to evaluate some of our optics, and as usual we dumped the beam into our foamed carbon beam stops. But why let all that energy go to waste, especially when it’s easy to skip meals while working late? So we decided to grill some hot dogs while running the test. Here’s the result:

Yum! And here is a video of the cooking process. Next time we’ll have to throw an IR filter on the camcorder to reduce the brightness of the laser light.

We still have some spare hot dogs in the fridge, so if we need to do another test like this, we’ll probably cook some more. This time, we just need to remember to bring some condiments…

Here’s a minor example of an interesting sound this year. The motors in our tracking mirror make an interesting sound as they move, and when the control computer is powered on, it has a short start-up / calibration sequence for the mirror which moves it and makes a few notes.

If we get the time, maybe we’ll program the mirror to play a song…