TSO-B Day 5: Nearing Liftoff

Fully rested from a day at the beach, Tinkerers resumed work on their various space flight modules Thursday, preparing for launch the following day. For some, the looming Friday deadline was a tad daunting.

“We should’ve skipped beach day,” Akash said as he looked upon the spacecraft shell his team had constructed.

For other teams, Thursday was an opportunity to repair mishaps that had taken place the previous Tuesday. Team mars rover repaired a cracked steering and suspension system and the gyroscope team refined their framing to improve weight support. The day clearly presented an opportunity to improve upon existing projects.

“Considering we were the ones to design the control panel in the first place, we have to upgrade it,” River, of the spacecraft team, said.

Still, much progress was made. The gyroscope team installed a seat belt to their gyroscope chair and constructed the third rotating frame, an octagon to fit in the center of their existing rotating square frames. The gravity challenge teams were able to stand their large constructed frames upright with pulleys and bungees installed for testing. The space factory was able to send their first five-gallon bottle of water down their space factory’s conveyor belt.

Finally, in what seemed unlikely to Akash at the start of the day, the spacecraft team was able to use a repaired mars rover to transport their spacecraft to the launch pad site before it was raised to an upright position.

Check out our photo slideshow and videos below to see some of our Tinkerers’ creations.