Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Steady Progress!

This time in 2013 I was just connecting with Copenhagen Suborbitals and working at full speed to prepare to test an early draft of my pressure suit; this time in 2014 I was contracting with SpaceX on pressure garmennts, visiting their mind-melting Hawthorne, California facilities. This time in 2015 I was rushing to prepare a pressure garment for demonstration at TEDx Portland. The project has come a long way and progress and events have been rapid-fire, so much so that I often am unable to appreciate these unique experiences. Somehow I would love to sit down and think about them -- but there's no time, which is OK at the moment. This year I'm completing my flight instruction and will start flying the Mark VI pressure suit to high altitudes, this suit being a distillation of all I have learned since the project began in 2008!

I'm also preparing for a visit to India, where I will talk on the reinvention of human space exploration technologies and visit the Indian Space Research Organization, a visit to the Google SciFoo event, a free-corm collaboration that I've been invited to attend, and the Oregon Institute of Technology's Tech Talk, in May -- all of that after next week's demonstration of our balloon equipment at the Pearson Air Museum! Some day I'll come up for a breath :)

Photo: Incredible week with Copenhagen Suborbitals, Denmark 2013. L to R, John Haslett, Peter Madsen, Kristian von Bengtson and me.

Photo: Rocket production floor at SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California:

Photo: At TEDx Brussels, December 2014 (which was followed by a talk at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics).

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