Team Frednet | Similar organizations | Forum

As everyone probably knows by now, Team Frednet are an open source entrant in Google's lunar X Prize.  More than any other group we've come across so far, we will probably be able to learn a lot from these people.  Their lunar mission is unmanned and one way so we won't be able to look to them for life support, voice transmission or reentry ideas, but we will be able to benefit tremendously from looking at their approaches to non-voice communication, navigation and guidance, and lunar lander engine / RCS.

The main reason I'm starting a thread for Frednet even though most of us are aware of them is to let people know that I sent a Friends of CSTART email to them this morning so hopefully we will hear from them soon.

As probably goes without saying, the person from Team Frednet I contacted with regards to this never replied.

I have taken the time to do a little more research on TF's organisational structure, and I hit upon this page in their Wiki, which gave me the name and email address of the Team Leader (the person I contacted last time was the head of their Business Plan group).  I've sent another email to the Team Leader (explaining in a PS that someone else has already heard from us and that we just wanted to make sure the request had reached the appropriate people).  I changed the text somewhat to try to reduce the possibility of it being misidentified as spam (discussing this with brmj in IRC a while ago, we noticed that the very formal language used in the Friends of CSTART template does sound superficially like a lot of those Nigerian prince scams, so this may possible explain our relatively low response rate).  Hopefully this time we will hear back!

natronics said:

_isn't_. Sorry. He doesn't seem excited.

Well, that's a shame and a disappointment, but I suppose there is not much we can do about it.  As you said, perhaps when our plans are a little more concrete there will be some interest (although, the more I poke around the TFN Wiki, the more I get the impression they have done far less than I thought and don't have all that much concrete themselves, unless they're hiding it elsewhere).

Thanks very much for asking him for us, anyway.

I realise things have been quiet on the CSTART-PNAS front for a while now, after an enthusiastic initial response.  I think this is mostly just due to bad timing, with a lot of us being away at around the same time.  We're hoping for a big IRC meeting this upcomming weekend, and how to proceed with a cooperative effort on OHKLA will be one of the things we discuss as a priority.  Hopefully we will be in a position to talk more seriously and concretely about cooperation very soon. :)

I also might hop on your Uncertainty group's mailing list in the nearish future (I'm a little swamped with work at the moment) to see if I can contribute (I have some recent background in computational Bayesian modelling, which seems right up their alley).