Defining final structure of our proposal
Friends
I propose that now we compile all of our discussions under various requirements. I suggest someone to work and design a Request for Proposal(RFP) for the tasks to be fulfilled, and then we address all the issues as a single document. Till now we have been discussing on ideas and issues but we need to come to a final conclusive summary of all the identified points. Only discussions will not fulfil the cause. We have to work on a solid proposal for our "Waystation", the challenges associated and our creative responses to them. Already various issues have been identified and a lot of discussion done but our goal is to make a solid proposal for the SGC.
So get ready for take off!!!!
Neeraj Neil Kohli
The idea of RFP sounds great.
However, don't we have already some performance requirements for our system in the original document?
Anyway, as far as I understood from reading the forum, we have major different areas to address. For these various aspects to be considered, I would suggest to use the following tools:
http://www.affinitymc.com/Affinity_Diagram.pdf
it's about this small book titled "The Seven Management & Planning Tools" (Ever heard of IPPD?).
I did use it extensively in my team work / research projects. It's about very effective tools to help us manage and develop the many ideas we come up with. Because, honestly, I got lost at points with all these different threads.
Also, for each area (let's say geology), a good project entails the promotion of more than one alternative, because if you choose one alternative only, this may be in conflict with some other solution we came up with for another area (let's say "in situ resources availability").
Once you have different options for each of the subproblems being tackled, you can combine one option from each subgroup and arrive to a possible concept for the all system/project. The the question becomes to assess the various concepts amongst one another to see which one seems feasible/viable in terms of some metrics that we have to establish. Makes it all sense? At this point, I found it hard to figure out where we stand.
To give an example, if you want to design an a/c, you have various disciplines. let's say we have propulsion and aerodynamics. Let's say the requirement is Mach > 3 ....
for propulsion you could think of ramjet, turbojet;
for aerodynamics, you could choose: "blended wing", "regular" wing...
so now you have 4 concepts for your a/c and you need to establish which one works best for your mission (based on some metric and criterion).
So,
1) RFP is important to identify needs, and system requirements;
(original project document should be of help)
2) Identify the metrics of performance
3) outline our areas of investigation
4) find alternatives for each area
5) combine area-wise alternatives to generate system concepts
6) evaluate those concepts based on some goodness of fit for our mission/system requirements
Hi Neeraj,
sorry that it hasn't been possible to respond to your original post on this thread and your other posts. It's been difficult managing work & studies. I'm sure everyone else is in the same situation.
I know its late in the day and this post probably will not be read until the congress has actually started! But I thought I'd write something before I catch my flight. I agree that we have yet to combine our various discussions into a single document, looks like this will have to be done at the congress. But a mission staement was agreed upon a while back by Aravind, Ben and Olav which is:
"To establish and determine an architecture for future strategic navigation system, common geodetic net, timeframe and landing sites on Moon with a view to promote international cooperation for lunar exploration"
Objectives set by the Planetary society were then narrowed down to those that seemed possible for the team to tackle and reflective of the mission statement. These were:
1) Lunar Navigation System
2) Common Geodetic Net
3) Common Lunar Timeframe
4) International Landing Sites
5) Timeline, Group Assignments, and Scheduling
Some of these got more attention than others! but some enabling technologies were identified or atleast speculated upon!
There is much more to do, but I do believe that we have addressed (to some extent) the objectives set for the SGC. These were:
Design a proposal that meets requirements set by the planetary society
Identify current/future technologies
The other objectives such as defining the project fully, preparation of promotional material, management and designing our own waystation, I understand to be overall objectives of the project. The designing of a website and writing a paper to be published in journals are part of the long term goals of this project.
Of course the more we could have contributed to these overall goals before the congress, the better it would have been. but....(you know the rest!) I hope that we can use the time at the congress to work on some of these goals, as well as to consolidate what we have discussed so far.
Satinder
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