Forum | CLLARE Project Overview document

Okay, I have sent a copy of the current document to Paul and Gary from OLF, Peter from Copenhagen, and to the project leader of Lunar Numbat (as part of a Friends of CSTART offer).  I removed the Hindenberg reference before sending it and also fixed up the fuel mass graph (I realised that the script I'd been running to up date the graph in the past doesn't actually do so, it only updates the text file the graph is generated from – with the new, actually up to date graph, things are far closer to the line than before, requiring an Isp of 450s.  This is achievable, but hard, but we can probably expect to get the total mass down a bit in the future by various means).

I've held off on sending a copy to Sanjoy from One Flag in Space just for now because I realised that the document doesn't actually make any mention of OFIS, whereas it does have linked references to all of the other groups above.  In the interests of fairness I will put together a new version later tonight which mentions our partnership with OFIS and will send it to Sanjoy.

After all the work on getting the document to this stage, I'm going to take a bit of time off from CSTART now (just a few days), or at least a few days of drastically decreased involvement, with the exceptions of (i) replying to the emails I mentioned sending above, and notifying people of replies via the forum, and (ii) helping out the new software folks who are working on USOFS so that they can remain productive and don't lose interest so shortly after joining.  I will read and respond to emails and PMs from anybody during this time, so if you need some quick input on something don't hesitate to ask, but I won't be particularly active on the forums without prodding.

I have made another push, a fairly major one:

• Completed the introductory chapter (expanded how to get involved in CLLARE, how to suggest changes to the document)
• Completed the CM overview and structure sections.
• Expanded on the CM RCS somewhat.
• Expanded a lot on the OSM (whose "detailed description" section was practically blank)
• Expanded all the sections on the EVA suit, which were previously quite glossed over.
• Removed the list of authors from the front page since I wasn't comfortable with only my name being on it so close to completion.  This has been replaced with a version number and a date.

The document is really starting to feel quite near completion.  The major remaining holes are:

• Power estimates for all electrical equipment.
• Cost estimates for everything except the Falcon 9 launches.
• Decent mass estimates for the OSM.
• Justification for the 300 kg mass estimate of the unfuelled lander.

If anybody wants to do any work at all on plugging those gaps, I will be happy to take care of LaTeXification and Mercury committing, but I probably won't have time to actually do this work myself in the near future.

No worries!  The only thing we have that is close to a deadline for this document is SpaceUp, which is still about a month away, so there will be plenty of time after you get back from your current work trip for you to make some contributions.  Hopefully by that stage we'll have received some feedback from various external sources and there will be a nice list of work for people to do.