From: utzoo!decvax!cca!HPM@S1-A@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.space
Title: Firsts, seconds
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.3214
Posted: Fri Sep 10 13:40:25 1982
Received: Sat Sep 11 02:12:33 1982

From: Hans Moravec 
	Contrary to several of the news reports, the Space Services
Conestoga rocket was NOT the first rocket launched by a privately
owned company.  Even discounting small sounding rockets, the German
based company OTRAG had two successful launches comparable to
the SSIsuborbital one, and with a liquid fueled rocket of their own
design, in the late seventies.

	There were about a half dozen NASA funded research projects
in the early sixties that studied remote control of a lunar rover
from Earth, using a 2.5 sec time delay in the control loop.
Many of these had (primitive) predictors, where a dot in the image
showed where the vehicle would be is the speed and direction were
unchanged over the next 2.5 secs.  The Stanford AI lab cart was a
refugee from such a project conducted by the Stanford Mech E. dept.