“The LER performed flawlessly in front of the President,” tweets NASA. And so it did, at the very end of the inaugural parade: dropping off a passenger dressed appropriately for the weather — who then walked off with the flag.
Here’s video of the Johnson Space Center’s new Lunar Electric Rover in action yesterday:
Houston’s entry in this morning’s afternoon’s DC inaugural parade is all set! Twittering live, NASA’s Rob Ambrose reports the new JSC-built Lunar Electric Vehicle is in the parade staging area: “LER Looks good.”
And it does! Remember that moon buggy the late-Apollo astronauts rode on the lunar surface? The new moon SUV is ready for the next generation of moon missions . . . or a few parades and photo ops at least:
Legacy Restaurants, the owners of Ninfa’s on Navigation, is starting up another chain using the Ninfa’s name. The first Ninfa’s Mexican Kitchen, “inspired by the original Ninfa’s but with an upscale twist,” will open on NASA Road 1 across from the Johnson Space Center early next year. “Adding to the confusion is the fact that all the other Ninfa’s Mexican restaurants are individually owned and are not related to Legacy Restaurants. Investor Neil Morgan, who also owns the rights to Antone’s restaurants, purchased Ninfa’s on Navigation in 2006, and he and [CEO Chris] Harter formed Legacy Restaurants to manage it as a wholly owned subsidiary.” [Houston Business Journal]
“But there are plenty of challenges to overcome first. To camp on the moon, astronauts need to be shielded from solar radiation. In a waterless environment every drop of H2O, including sweat and urine, must be recycled and purified. NASA engineers are sorting through dozens of possible models for the lunar outpost—from horizontal, aluminum cylinders to inflatable structures that are essentially giant, Kevlar-reinforced balloons.” [Smithsonian]
CNET’s Daniel Terdiman takes a tour of the Johnson Space Center and comes back with some photos of equipment and facilities being developed for Constellation, the back-to-the-moon project scheduled to begin launching in 2013. (The Space Shuttle program will be phased out by 2010.)
For those of us interested in the latest in Houston interiors technology, Terdiman includes photos of a mockup of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, meant to take the next generation of astronauts to the moon and beyond. Is that a strip of velcro on the wall on the right? Cool!
Doesn’t look so exciting to you? Hey, they’ve got 5 years to work on it!
After the jump: The Orion capsule mockup from the outside, plus the new 12-wheeler parked outside!
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