Ground Control to Major Tom?

Many of you may want to ask "Who's this Major Tom guy?" or "Why would they name a lunar cargo transport system after a military officer?" Well, we would ask you "Have you ever heard of David Bowie?"

Major Tom was a valiant astronaut who was sent into space and soared "past one hundred thousand miles" according to the hit song Space Oddity from 1969 by who else but David Bowie, an innovative musician with numerous other hits. As for why we would name our transport system after this fictional character from the David Bowie universe, well, it was quite simple. If you think about all the satellite and spacecraft names out there, they all have some sort of "deep" meaning behind them or are some long acronym. We spent many hours trying to think of a name or acronym that fit perfectly and came to the conclusion that this task was harder than anything we had been working on for the design up to that point. Being the brilliant, time managing engineers that we are, we decided to scrap any name/acronym that had any real meaning and simply go with the single greatest space reference in popular culture...Major Tom

this is our favorite version of the music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o

The PISCES Lunar Outpost Design Competition

The major goal of the PISCES Lunar Outpost Student Design Competition is to allow the interaction between PISCES and students with the purpose of furthering the development of space exploration. The competition invites students to develop new and creative ideas relating to a lunar outpost in the following areas:

• overall habitat design (architecture)
• lunar resource utilization
  
• supporting subsystems
  
• issues of operations in space and on planetary surfaces
• analog field demonstrations of planetary surface exploration systems

The first report was due by July 15th and now, because of our success we are required to continue the development of our idea and report the results in a presentation and paper at the annual PISCES Conference and Analog Outpost Workshop. For us, that means we will have a very extraordinary opportunity to not only present our ideas, but meet and connect with people who have an extensive knowledge of various aspects of space exploration.

For more information you can check out their website here:
http://pisces.hilo.hawaii.edu/

PISCES Winners aka We're Going to Hawaii

Our "Major Tom: Lunar Cargo Transport" design has secured us 1st place in the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES) Student Design Competition. We've started this blog to keep anyone and everyone informed as we complete the work for our final presentation and paper for the 2009 PISCES Conference in Hawaii (November 2-6). Thanks to all that contributed and we hope to represent Wisconsin well, most likely in red and white Hawaiian shirts with the matching leis.

from PISCES:
"PISCES has selected the University of Madison, Wisconsin’s report “Major Tom: Lunar Cargo Transport” as the winner of this year’s PISCES Student Design Program. Competition was very stiff and we would liked to have selected several additional projects; however, budget limitations due to the current financial problems prevent us from doing so. I thank all of the teams who contributed to this project and their faculty advisors for putting the time and energy into the competition. We hope that you will continue to have an interest in PISCES and contribute to next year’s Student Design Competition.

With best regards to all,

Mike Duke and the PISCES Team"