(Imported from old site; original post: Tuesday, February 5, 2013)

So I have escaped the winter snowfall of Kentucky in lieu of California’s weather. I am currently in Ventura California at the Gordon Research Conference in Atmospheric Reentry Physics. Why am I qualified to be here, you ask? Don’t worry. I don’t know, either…

I was invited to present information about the REBR project that my team decided to design. We still didn’t have the project fully defined at the time, so we did as much research as possible, figured out where REBR could be best used (e.g. research universities), guessed at what we thought REBR could be used for in addition to its current capabilities, and defined the project ourselves. We then created a large presentation poster containing these ideas. “Hopefully,” we thought, “Aerospace Corporation will agree that the direction we have chosen is the best direction.” And they did. Well, Dr. Bill (William) Ailor did. But he IS Aerospace Corporation to me, so same thing.

Dr. Ailor was the only one in attendance from Aerospace Corporation (that I found), and after reading the poster and talking it over with me, he gave us the go-ahead to continue the work we started. There have been other people I have had conversations with here that have also agreed, at least to an extent of wanting to see more development of it, and that it has good potential. Including people from the ESA (European Space Agency), DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) from the United Kingdom, NASA Langley, and Lockheed Martin. No big deal… Those are in no particular order of awesome, because they are all awesome.

Following is the poster that was presented at the conference about our new design for REBR. We call it, REBR-UPS, which stands for ReEntry Breakup Recorder–Universal Payload System. Beware: it’s 12.5 MB. Keep in mind, the actual size of the poster is very nearly 4 feet wide, and 5.5 feet tall.