Rescheduled meetings, Web infrastructure, and more on Tech Advisor Council

Hi,

Today wasn’t the day I was hoping it would be. But it was good, nonetheless. I’ve been trying to have a meeting between two of my advisors – two that have never met, even though they are in the same time. I want them to work on something together. We just can’t seem to sync our schedules for it. It’s pushed back to Wednesday next week. This is the 3rd reschedule. That is always a little frustrating.

I guess that means I’ll be super-prepared for the meeting when it finally happens. The funny thing about this is that there is very little that I have to do. They either like each other, and the project, and want to work on it together… or they don’t.

In other news, we worked on the robot design a little today. Nothing significant to report, yet.

Because I had time to kill, waiting for the meeting that was originally postponed, and then ultimately cancelled, I simply poked around on my laptop for a couple hours. I spent quite a while working on email, our mail server, and both of our webservers. In short, none of these basic infrastructure assets are where I’d like them to be.

Josh is taking point on getting this stuff organized. I’ve asked if we can have our updated database up and running this weekend. He thinks he can. If that happens, then I’ll begin the next phase of the communications re-start: surveys of the $100+ backers.

A couple folks asked about more information regarding the Technical Advisor Council. Put bluntly, I rely on folks a lot smarter than me to figure out certain aspects of this project. This ad hoc / volunteer community has been mostly stagnant for the past year. My goal in re-activating them is to receive a formalized commitment regarding their role on this project. I’m developing a contract, organizing their contact information, and collecting their bio, resume/cv, any papers they may have written which relate to this project, and any social media information they are willing to share.

Later, as capital is available, I’ll assign works-for-hire research contracts for specific problems that need to be resolved. Obvious problems include: ‘How long is the Ribbon?’, ‘What is the Ribbon made of?, ‘How do we anchor to the surface of the Moon? Non-obvious issues might be: “What are the historic, cultural and theological implications of harvesting lunar regolith?”, “Who ‘owns’ the system we’re building, once it touches down on the Lunar surface?”, “How – specifically – do we pay for this thing?”

Each of these questions, and thousands more, need answers. Fortunately, this project attracts some very very smart people, and in most cases, we’ve got experts who can begin to tackle these Challenges.  I continue to recruit more experts.

​Take care, mjl