Week 6 has begun

As you are probably aware, my posts do not describe everybody's experiences at SSP. There are 7 departments (or tracks), so I only really know what is happening in Policy & Law. Similarly, there are 3 team projects, and I will only discuss the human-robotic cooperation team. Today our team submitted the Letter of Intent for our team project. Our Chair and the SSP Director have received it and we eagerly await feedback. Our team's mission statement is:

It is the mission of the Cooperation of Humans and Robots for Mars (CHARM) team to propose a model for effective human-robot cooperation and apply it to Mars exploration scenarios for the time frame between 2015 and 2035.

We spent the morning researching various aspects of our project. Right now we are in 3 sub-teams researching existing Mars mission scenarios, current mission models, and human-robotic cooperation. Organizing ourselves to accomplish our milestones is quite the leaning experience in itself!

After that we had the eighth Department Activity session. Today we learned about ESA/EU's Galileo global navigation satellite system. René Oosterlinck and Ingo Baumann, both experts on the topic, were our guest lecturers. René was appointed ESA Director of the Galileo Program and Navigation in April 2008 and is now retired. Ingo worked in the law department at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and then established and now runs a law firm called BHO Legal.

This evening we had an Austrian style BBQ! It was a delicious meal! I had sausages, grilled chicken, veggies, potato salad, and strudel for dessert! Then I said goodbye to Will Pomerantz, my friend and guest lecturer for the SSP Business & Management Department. That's it for today!

Tomorrow we have a field trip to Vienna to visit the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, the European Space Policy Institute, RUAG (a Swiss technology company), and Siemens.