Module 2, Week 2: TWiR
I never thought I would say this but jet lag is killing me. I’ve changed two major time zones (Peru – Korea – France) in 15 days and I can really feel how unfocused my mind is. I hope that next week I’ll be better.
Anyway, each day is a new experience for me since I’ve never lived alone before, so maintaining an apartment has become quite a challenge. I think I will buy a robot from iRobot to clean the house. I love cooking, I hate cleaning.
Last week we started working on Assignment 2-1: How to design a spacecraft that could go to the moon and deliver a set of penetrators. These penetrators would penetrate (sorry for the redundancy) the lunar soil in pre-chosen sites and gather data for scientific research.
After a week of very hard work (after all, we also had lectures and the Team Project) we made the presentations to the faculty. I think that our group did a very good job but other teams did better (for example, SLAM).
SLAM’s team presentation on Assignment 2-1. Source: Manuel Antonio Cuba.
Fortunately my thesis from my MSc. in Industrial Engineering is on the Space Launch Services industry; that helped me a lot to evaluate the rocket and upper stage required for the mission. Unfortunately I forgot to mention how we would deal with ITAR since our upper stage was manufactured by ATK and our fictitious company was not an American corporation. This issue was raised by Professor Tolyarenko during the Q&A.
Regarding the lectures some of them were repetitions from SSP09 so there wasn’t much of new stuff. However I really enjoyed the lecture on Risk Management. After the lecture we had an exercise that followed, in a very simple way, the different processes involved in Risk Management. This information would have been very handy when I was Account Delivery Manager/Project Manager at HP.