I'm Commanding a VIP mission to Mars Desert Research Station this February

I'll be commanding MDRS Crew 329 in mid-February in Utah.  This will be a heavily filmed mission with a YouTube creator Cody Reeder ((1) Cody'sLab - YouTube), who has 2.2 million subscribers. We are doing a shorter (1 week) mission with a strong focus on bringing updated technology to the hab.  Thre of our crew are among the few people who have built pressurized spacesuit prototypes at home, and we will be testing them at the Mars analog facility.  We will extend the Crew EVA Link project we created, and we will also do a lot of VR and satellite link work.  My personal experiments are a stratospheric balloon flight to see if we can get cosmic ray traces in materials, and an R/C 1:10 scale version of my Lunar polar rover land-train concept that we will attempt to drive in steep terrain.  We are bringing customs spacesuits with head-up displays and arm keyboards, along with a lot of other experiments.  I'm deeply excited to be part of what may prove to be a series of such missions. I'll also be posting mission videos to my YouTube channel, (1043) MacroInvent - YouTube. 

I'm joining a Polytechnic University Advisory Board

I have been chosen and approved for the University Advisory Board for University of Wisconsin-Stout, which is the polytechnic university in the Wisconsin educational system.  I'll be advising the Design Studies department and program. More details to follow when I get my official digital badging and profile page. This will be a unique opportunity to both assist the next generation and expand my network to include more talented professionals with an eye on inventing the future. 

I won the NASA Design Competition for Shackelton Crater Exploration

In September of 2024, NASA put out a pair of competitions called Find Me on the Moon. The first competition was to design a low-technology navigation aid that would not use electricity.  There were to be ten prizes for that one, with the highest being $10,000.  The second competition was to design a system that could enter Shackelton Crater on the moon's south pole and return samples, which had three prizes and a grand prize of $20,000.  I won the grand prize for Shackelton exploration and got an honorable mention prize for the navigation competition. Here are the results. There are a lot of amazing designs from a lot of very clever and talented people.  I'm honored to be included with them. 

I'll be posting more about this once the competition results are formally published.  My design was a group of small modular rovers that could be connected in land trains.  It also has points for mounting any stabilization equipment needed to make it down the long, dark slopes into a permanently dark crater. These points can also carry, power, and communicate with tools and instrumentation along the land train.  Polar land trains were used successfully in the 1960's to build US military installations in the Arctic. 

Ironically, I put a lot more effort into my optical navigation proposal, which didn't even get tenth place.  It essentially re-wrote older aircraft navigation methods using VOR, but made a miniature visual system.   The forearm-mounted theodolite/map and navigation theory are pretty elegant, even if the passively-lit towers were less so. 

Mars Sample Return Analysis (May-August, 2024). 

When NASA put out a call for proposals in the spring of 2024 to revise the Mars Sample Return program, I was very interested in seeing if a proposal from a small team could be considered.  As it turned out, there were too many roadblocks for any entity that didn't already have a team of government paperwork specialists in place.  But I, Dr. Tony Muscatello (NASA- Retired) and Dr. Robert Zubrin did a panel on ideas we had over the summer and presented it at the Mars Society Conference in Seattle that Fall. 

Each of us had done proposal designs for Mars Sample Return, so we were familiar with the problem.  I did a 93-page design paper on Mars Sample Return in 2008 and won a competition with it, Tony was on the third and last Red Dragon study at NASA, and Robert had done several designs dating back almost three decades.  We each worked on new updates to those designs, and Tony and I actually did two concepts (one based on Dragon, the other on Starship).  Tony and I combined our PowerPoints and the proposals are Here. 

Kent Nebergall

X.com - Grok - I asked, "Who is Kent Nebergall?"