HPM@S1-A@sri-unix (09/10/82)
From: Hans Moravec <HPM at S1-A> 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.