Welcome to simonvdb.be version 4.0! It’s been quiet here for some time now, but that should be about to change. The new design is not completely finished yet, so you’ll see some changes in the coming weeks and months. The main goal of the new design is to focus more on the contents, and leave the other clutter out as far as possible.

Well, you’d be hard pressed to notice judging from the number of blogs, but the year since the last blog post has been a pretty busy one. Between working on school projects, writing a thesis, working for EUROAVIA and then moving to the Netherlands and starting to work at ESA, blogging was pushed almost to the bottom of the priority list. However, I’m moving it up again as we speak, so prepare for some more frequent blogging in the near future!

Space Development Theory and Practice, that’s 11 days of language problems, misunderstandings, smelly orange t-shirts and traffic jams. But also of unique experiences and warm people in a great country.

Space DTP is an international event that’s organized every year by the Youth Space Center of Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU). On the program are visits to various institutions and companies, and also a teamwork project. Its main goals are to bring people from all over the world in contact with each other and with the Russian space industry. I can tell you many more stories about these 11 days, but here are already some great highlights:

• In Star City, the famous cosmonaut training center, we saw up close cosmonauts training for spacewalks on the International Space Station in the neutral buoyancy facility there. That is basically a largo swimming pool in which the cosmonauts float to simulate zero gravity operations.
• We visited a special facility of the BMSTU in Orevo, near Moscow. The ultimate playground for any engineer interested in space. The facility consists of real space hardware, including an R-7 booster, Soyuz capsule and even a lunar lander prototype. Everything is set up so you can touch it, climb on it and go inside.
• The museum at the headquarters of RSC Energia, ‘the oldest space organization in the world’, contains amazing and unique spacecraft. Backup flight hardware of all early satellites and lunar and planetary landers, a training set-up of part of the Mir space station, crowned by the very capsules in which Yuri Gagarin (first man in space), Alexei Leonov (first spacewalk) and Valentina Tereshkova (first woman in space) came back to Earth.
• We had the chance to ask many questions and receive extended, detailed and interesting answers from Anatoly Perminov, head of Roscosmos, Aleksandr Lazutkin, cosmonaut on the dangerous Mir-23 mission and Sergei Krikalev, who has spent 803 days in space, more than anyone else.

No less interesting highlights of our program included the Russian ISS Mission Control Center, Moscow’s memorial museum of cosmonautics, Monino Air Force base and many more. We also worked on a team project involving an ‘artificial gravity’ rotating space station.

But it was not only the ‘space things’ that were impressive. Immediately upon arrival and throughout the whole trip, every international participant felt truly welcome in this big country. We had the chance to get a taste of the life of a Russian student and made many new friends. And of course we also got the chance to play the tourist for a while We visited many of Moscow’s highlights, including the Red Square, Lenin’s Mausoleum, the Kremlin, Tretyakov gallery, Gorky Park and the ‘All-Russian Exhibition Center’. We also got the chance to attend a ballet and by chance found ourselves in an Orthodox church service in the beautiful monastery of St. Sergius – Lavra.

Russia is a gigantic country. It has a complex history and is rightly proud of its achievements in spaceflight. I would like to thank all organizers of Space DTP as well as all participants. It was great to be part of it, and I hope to see you all again sometime! до свидания!

What does Lego have to do with spaceflight? Apart from cool Mindstorms competitions, the history of Lego can tell us something about the importance of flexibility, modularity and creativity. An article of mine that was just published at The Space Review tries to apply these to making an architecture for spaceflight. Here’s a short abstract:

‘Brick by brick: a Lego spaceflight paradigm.What Lego bricks tell us about modularity, flexibility and cost, and how that applies to the future of American human spaceflight. A comparison of the Constellation architecture, the ‘commercially based’ architecture proposed by Zegler et al., and the proposal of the Obama administration.’

The ‘Carl Sagan’ spaceship. Credit: Lego Monster on Flickr.

The ‘Zegler et al.’ paper is called ‘A Commercially Based Lunar Architecture‘. It proposes a radically different, yet much more affordable approach to spaceflight than the Constellation program. If we would have had this paper at the Space Station Design Workshop (it wasn’t published yet), I think we could have made a much more affordable and flexible lunar base than the 100 billion dollar LORETTA base we created. Not that I’m any less proud of it .

I admit that the article isn’t the most ‘accessible’ text I’ve ever written, but have a go at it if you’re somewhat interested, and let me know what you think! If you want even more, the Zegler et al. paper is highly recommended reading .

While the second semester is in the starting blocks, I finally got some time to write something on the project I did in the first semester, for my Digital Signal Processing ‘Advanced topics’ course. The project was about vision-based pose tracking in the Wearable Augmented Reality (WEAR) program.

Augmented reality consists of adding a layer of information to what you’re seeing, for example keeping you up to date with online reviews of the restaurant you’re standing in front of. For a number of tasks that require many instructions, procedures or manuals, having this overlap can greatly increase efficiency, as proved in the ARMAR project of the University of Columbia and the US Marine Corps.

In the WEAR project, Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne has been testing a system on the ISS designed by Space Applications Services for the European Space Agency. For this system, the ‘pose’ – where the user is looking – is determined by comparing video data with a 3D model of the environment. This requires some advanced image processing wizardry, and this part was outsourced to the Electrical Engineering department at my university. I got the opportunity to play around with the software they made, and tested the system in a couple of environments it wasn’t really made for. You can see some results in the videos underneath. I would also like to thank David Tingdahl for helping me out with all of this.

Yesterday, on the annual Thanksgiving dinner of USAIRE in Paris, I was awarded the second place in the student award competition of 2009! The aim of this year’s contest was to study how the aerospace world of 2050 will look like, and write a 10-page paper about this. The official title was ‘What will the civil and military space look like in 2050? What consequences will this have on our industry’s competitiveness and innovation ambitions?’

USAIRE is a 50-year old association of American and European companies focused on aerospace and advanced technologies. Members include Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, EADS, Eurocopter, Lockheed Martin, Northtrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rolls-Royce, Thales and many more. The Thanksgiving dinner took place at the Cercle d’Union Interalliée, in the very centre of Paris, close to Place de la Concorde. After the dessert, it was time for the announcement of the results.

And second place it was. Prizes include two tickets Paris – New York on Air France, a Panasonic Toughbook, a cheque from USAIRE (and a very generous one at that), and a year long subscription to both Air & Cosmos and Aviation Week and Space Technology. Yes, I’m very happy You can find the full text here (pdf, 10mb), or enjoy the summary: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since my last blog post. The past couple of months have been very busy, and there’s no improvement in sight. To ease the pain a bit: a movie of the result of our project work a the electrical engineering departement (ESAT, K.U.Leuven), made by group 1 in 2008-2009.

Our goal was to make a robot, ‘Dragon’, which balances on two wheels, drives and makes turns. Dragon also communicates wirelessly with a pc, detects obstacles and is outfitted with parking sensors and a display. To improve its coolness factor, it has been tuned with a couple LED-strips. I was in the Control team myself, our task was to get the robot to stand up and drive. We’re very happy with the result. The movie included was made by Bertrand Dujardin. It just needs a mini-flamethrower to make the thing perfect…

Design a base on the Moon. The basic concept of this years Space Station Design Workshop sounds quite simple, but actually doing this is everything but easy. Doing it in only one week is just impossible, but team BLUE was up for the challenge. Beating the RED team soon became the first item of our to-do list.

And quite some base we’ve made. You have to know, a spacecraft is a complicated thing. Putting humans on it doesn’t make it any easier, neither does building it some 400 000 km away.

This is the final result. The LORETTA base is located at Shackleton 2, on a crater rim close to the lunar South Pole, where it receives sunlight almost all year long. For uninterrupted communication with Earth, we’ve put a relay antenna on the Malapert mountain range, some 150 km from Shackleton. By 2025, we have a permanent international crew of six on 180-days missions. As the future tourist brochure states, our station not only sets new standards for crew comfort, but also provides the starting point for exploration of the lunar surface, technology demonstrations for Mars and beyond, and offers enormous possibilities for innovative research.

A base like this doesn’t just work all by itself. To keep our dear astronauts alive and kicking, we need systems. All kinds of systems. Electrical power systems, thermal control systems, environmental control and life support systems, communication systems, but also a decent structure and protection from galactic radiation and solar flares. What we also want to know is how and when we’re going to launch all this hardware to the surface of the Moon, and last but not least how we are going to assemble the various modules of our lunar base. As you might imagine, even in 1/6 of Earth gravity, astronauts alone are not going to lift our modules off the Moon lander. We need robots for that. And big ones at that. As robotics and mobility was part of my tasks in the team, here are some more details:

For construction work, but also for exploration, science and just to keep our crew busy, I selected three main types of robots we will send to the Moon. The first bot is the big one, the heavy lifter called ATHLETE. Based on NASA prototypes, it is a giant but amazingly lightweight and flexible machine that is able to handle a huge range of terrain conditions. We are primarily using it to transport our base modules from the lander to the base site, to construct our radiation shield made up of lunar soil and to impress the other team. A lot of cool movies are hidden out there on the world wide web, and this is surely one of them:

Next to this heavy lifter, we also need an astronaut rover and a flexible small robot platform that has a workload consisting of automatic base inspection, upkeeping and maintenance, precision work and scientific research with a range of up to 50 km away from the Shackleton 2 site.

The LORETTA concept has at the end won the competition with a small margin. Because of the very different locations (on the poles vs. on the equator) of the BLUE and the RED bases, some systems were hardly comparable and basically, both designs were well thought-through. All that comes at a price though, not only in euros, but most of all in lack of sleep.

It was really an intense week. Meeting thirty people literally coming from all over the world, discussing, imagining, designing, laughing and partying together day and night. It was an amazing experience, a hands-on space systems engineering adventure, an exercise in cryptic acronyms, an Earth-based test of human endurance, and most of all, it was great, great fun. A big thank you to the SSDW staff and the workshop sponsors. Looking at the Moon will never be the same again.

Welcome to the new version of simonvdb.be! A lot has changed when compared to version 2. The blog has become the starting page, the portfolio section has been expanded, but most of all: this whole site is powered by WordPress now. This allows me to easily change and add the content of the site anywhere, anytime.

Furthermore, this version offers more flexibility for me, more features for you (search function, archives and categories in the side bar, for example), complete bilingual design Dutch-English thanks to the qTranslate plugin, easy picture and gallery managing with the NEXTGEN gallery plugin and some more updates about what I’m reading on the internet with the Delicious Cached plugin.

Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of it. Probably you will have to change RSS feeds etc. The site is still a work in progress, and I think there still are some quirks in it, but most of them are being worked upon. Have fun reading!

On the Space Elevator Blog, which I regularly read myself, the latest post figures the Space Elevator article Joris Gillis and me wrote for Euroavia News (published december 2007). By the way, if you happen to know other translations of ‘Space Elevator’ than the twelve already online here, please contact Ted Semon, the Space Elevator Blog webmaster.

Well, that’s over with. I finished my summer job project at ESAT today. It was a really nice experience, I’ve learned a lot of things and I’ve earned some money, all at the same time. This afternoon, I presented the result of my work of the past four weeks and the end result, this website, to part of the SISTA research team and the professors Bart De Moor and Joos Vandewalle. I’m quite happy with the results actually, and I got a nice compliment of prof. De Moor (for more details, you’ll have to e-mail me ).

Well, that’s over with. I finished my summer job project at ESAT today. It was a really nice experience, I’ve learned a lot of things and I’ve earned some money, all at the same time. This afternoon, I presented the result of my work of the past four weeks and the end result, this website, to part of the SISTA research team and the professors Bart De Moor and Joos Vandewalle. I’m quite happy with the results actually, and I got a nice compliment of prof. De Moor (for more details, you’ll have to e-mail me ).

Perhaps you’re wondering if I liked staring at a computer screen for four weeks and two days. Well, I have to say, I coped far better than I had exspected. It really motivates that you’re busy working on your own project and can really go for it, to make it as good as possible. Like I said, I’m really glad I learned a lot of things: what research at ESAT or research in general is all about and software like Matlab, Java and Linux. Of course, sometimes you get frustrated when everything just seems to go wrong, but probably that’s just a normal part of research too…

A lot of thanks to the department of electrical engineering, to my ‘mentors’ Leon-Charles Tranchevent and Shi Yu. I hope I helped you somewhat with your research. Anyway, thanks for being there when I needed you. Also a big thank you to my collegues Evelien, Nele, Pierre, Dries, Dieter and Jeroen. Without you guys it wouldn’t have been as much fun as it was.