{"id":495,"date":"2009-11-08T05:19:18","date_gmt":"2009-11-08T05:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/?p=495"},"modified":"2009-11-08T05:19:18","modified_gmt":"2009-11-08T05:19:18","slug":"armadillo-versus-the-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/space-flight\/armadillo-versus-the-weather.php","title":{"rendered":"Armadillo versus the weather"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in the Dallas area this weekend to (hopefully) see Armadillo Aerospace compete in the <a href=\"http:\/\/space.xprize.org\/lunar-lander-challenge\">Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge<\/a> at the Level 2 category. The &#8220;hopefully&#8221; is less associated with any technical issues&#8211;they&#8217;ve flown their &#8220;Super Mod&#8221; vehicle a number of times on the pads they&#8217;ve built at the Caddo Mills Municipal Airport northeast of Dallas&#8211;than the weather.  The forecast this weekend calls for rain, rain, and more rain, with some heavy storms mixed in.  It was raining when I arrived in Dallas late last night and is raining again, lightly, this morning.  However, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wunderground.com\/radar\/radblast.asp?zoommode=pan&amp;prevzoom=zoom&amp;num=6&amp;frame=0&amp;delay=15&amp;scale=1.000&amp;noclutter=0&amp;ID=FWS&amp;type=N0R&amp;showstorms=0&amp;lat=33.07109833&amp;lon=-96.23010254&amp;label=Caddo%20Mills,%20TX&amp;map.x=400&amp;map.y=240&amp;scale=1.000&amp;centerx=400&amp;centery=240&amp;showlabels=1&amp;rainsnow=0&amp;lightning=0&amp;lerror=20&amp;num_stns_min=2&amp;num_stns_max=9999&amp;avg_off=9999&amp;smooth=0\">weather radar<\/a> hints that there may be enough holes in the rain later today to make a flight attempt&#8211;maybe.<\/p>\n<p>For some background, <a href=\"http:\/\/cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com\/archive\/2009\/09\/11\/2064885.aspx\">MSNBC<\/a> and  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn17772-mock-lunar-landers-set-to-compete-for-1-million-prize.html\">New Scientist<\/a> published articles on the flight attempts by Armadillo (and Masten Space and Unreasonable Rocket, two other NGLLC teams planning Level 1 and Level 2 flight attempts). The setup at the airport is likely to be barebones, but <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/jeff_foust\">I will be posting updates via Twitter<\/a> as time and technology permit, as will <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/NGLLC09\">@NGLLC09<\/a>, the official Twitter account of the competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in the Dallas area this weekend to (hopefully) see Armadillo Aerospace compete in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Level 2 category. The &#8220;hopefully&#8221; is less associated with any technical issues&#8211;they&#8217;ve flown their &#8220;Super Mod&#8221; vehicle a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/space-flight\/armadillo-versus-the-weather.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-flight"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}