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.