Post edited 11:10 pm – January 6, 2010 by Luke Maurits
I feel like progress with CLLARE is going pretty well, especially with the new CLLARE by numbers page coming along nicely, which is the most detailed technical analysis of the whole project that has happened so far. I think that we are getting pretty close to the point where we have done just about all the overall big-picture design work for a moon mission which can be done by a small group of people with only basic physics and maths knowledge. Refining our plans further is going to require people with specialist knowledge in aerodynamics or structural engineering, etc., or with experience in building things like high pressure tanks.
I feel like a good goal for now might be to produce a really nice looking document around 10 pages in length which lays out all our plans for CLLARE in detail – describes the overall mission plan, the CM and the LL and their subsystems, our launch options etc., a sort of familiarisation manual for the entire project. This document should contain all of the technical details we have decided on so far, including estimated numbers for everything – basically the CLLARE by numbers page but with diagrams and a back story. Everytime somebody discovers CSTART for the first time and goes "Omg are u seriouz, don't u kno how hard it is to go to the moon?!!!!1″ we should be able to point them at this document to shut them up immediately and make it clear that we've done our homework.
I think that we could probably aim to have this document ready by the end of January and still get it done really nicely – including new, fully up-to-date renders of all the vehicles, scale diagrams of the stack next to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Soyuz for comparison, diagrams of trajectories and burns, etc. Once we have this ready it will be a good recruitment aid. People could print it out, put on a coversheet explaining what CSTART is, how we work and how anybody who wants to can help, and then hand them out to people leaving engineering and physics lectures at universities, or leave them in the shelves of university libraries near relevant sections. It will show people that we are serious and make it clear to them exactly what sort of skills we will need to go further.
If people feel like this is a good idea I will start work on a draft copy of the document soon. Does anybody else here have any experience with LaTeX? I think it would be the most appropriate thing to create this document with, but there's a bit of a learning curve involved in using it (not too great, though, if you can write HTML you'll be able to write LaTeX before too long) and I don't want to artificially limit myself to being the only one who can edit it.
Once this document is finalised, I feel like we should then focus on recruiting and on organisational stuff rather than more technical work because we will be about as far as we can go on that. The document will provide a firm technical basis for new recruits to start doing productive work. Also, once this document is done I hope that I will be able to step back to focus mainly on CLLARE navigation stuff (like starting to work on our trajectory simulation software with brmj and others) happily because there'll be nothing else I can really help with without doing extra study.
Our first organisational priority once the document is done should be the incorporation process, which we have really lost steam on. I feel like I have done all that I can to help that part along: the rest of the process needs to happen from within the US because it involves setting up a US PO Box, asking some questions of the NY DOS in person or on the phone, and submitting forms to a US address, paying the filing fee with a US cheque, etc. The next step will be opening a US bank account in the CSTART name, which I also can't help with. Everything that still needs to happen to get the incorporation stuff done is outlined very clearly in this thread. We owe it to our donors to follow through with it.
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