It is always fun to chat with Mike Doornbos – memories of some beers consumed together on the Isle of Man last October come immediately :-) -; and to be interviewed on Evadot is a great honour, especially if one is called “one of our favorite people in the world “ :-)

One of the why's we have been talking about The far side of the Moon with Puli Space is Kármán Tódor – for most of the readers known as Theodore von Kármán, an outstanding man. Just a quick list of some of his achievments here, cited from the Wikipedia article,

In 1944 he and others affiliated with GALCIT founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is now a Federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from NASA. In 1946 he became the first chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group which studied aeronautical technologies for the United States Army Air Forces. He also helped found AGARD, the NATO aerodynamics research oversight group (1951), the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (1956), the International Academy of Astronautics (1960), and the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Brussels (1956).

Not to forget the Kármán line, the edge of space, and the craters named after him – one on the far side of the Moon, and one on Mars.

2500. This is the number of high school students who were personally addressed by the Puli Space Team. Taking into account the population of Hungary this is a great number, it is the result of half a year’s work that was unfolding not only in Budapest but also in some other cities in the country.

At the beginning we were watching the students’ faces with doubt. How much are they interested in space exploration? Do they know who was the first or the second man on the Moon? Why Sputnik 1 and Gagarin’s flight (the 50th anniversary of which we are celebrating this year) was important? To exercise a bit of criticism on today’s society and media we could say that it is common for young people to ignore and turn away from literature, history, science and – ironically – technology that is actually considered to be the very base of our present and future society.

Come and celebrate with us the 50 years of manned spaceflight on the 12th of April. Team Puli Space proudly presents our new Art Director, András Márton, who will present an extraordinary performance on this special day in the Műcsarnok, the definitive exhibition hall in Hungary for the contemporary arts.

Still not enough? Yuri's night extra on the 15th at Corvintető!. Don't miss it!

The Puli has been on telly again. The evening news of Hungary's largest commercial television channel featured a minute long report on our activities on the occasion of one of our public events in the city of Kecskemét. Even though the little demonstrational rover pictured there is incorrectly stated as a prototype, the generally positive tone of the report is definitely inspiring.

Those waiting for the actual Puli prototypes have to hang on to their seats a little longer: the first ones are expected to appear in the 3rd iteration of our project (we've just started the second one) in about a year. But don't worry, we are constantly keeping everyone informed about our progress, next up we will feature some cool new simulations of our future rovers landing on the Moon. In the meantime, check out how Miklós Pathy preforms a graceful ballet movement upon deploying the demo rover for the cameras.

It is a long way to develop the necessary hardware and systems for a successful GLXP mission. There will be several iterations in this process: for us, Iteration 1 delivered the overall main concepts and first simple demonstration hardware pieces for two of our rover concepts. Since November 2010 we are busy with our second step: the Iteration 2/Hunveyor 15 project, which we intend to finish by August/September this year.

The Hunveyor program, led by Szaniszló Bérczi, took NASA's Surveyor spacecraft – seven Surveyors were sent to the Moon between 1966 and 1968, five of them landed smooth successfully, two crashed – as a basis to teach university students about planetary science and space probes at the same time. Started in 1997, various groups – amongst them you will find even secondary school guys! – have developed interesting scenarios, which were reported regularly at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conferences of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.

It is a great honour for us make the newest member of the Hunveyor-series, number 15. This we do in our second GLXP iteration step, thus the name Iteration 2/Hunveyor 15.

According to Wikipedia, “A number is a mathematical object used to count and measure.”

Admittedly, this does not sound very cool. But wait a minute – perhaps we can change your mind!

Let's start with our great dog: the most common measures for our namesake, the ancient Hungarian herding and livestock-guarding dog breed puli are its height and mass. Pulis can be at the withers as tall as 45 cm – or almost 18 inches – and its average mass is given as 23-25 pounds in the Wikipedia article or up to 15 kg in the Hungarian wiki version.

Every year’s biggest meetup event is the New Tech Meetup, which is held in the same time in 380 cities in the World. In Budapest it has celebrated its fourth birthday. Puli’s team was also invited to the event, so the coordinator of the educational department, Márton Deák represented us.

More than 400 people could listen presentations about such topics like nano-medicines and UAV's.  The rules of the event were quite strict, so every speaker had only 5 minutes, which was followed by questions for 5 minutes too. Luckily it was enough to present the GLXP and the basics of our team’s mission – so to know why and how can it be useful to support our initiative, and of course  the big question: why do we go to the Moon at all?

Fortunately our team had a great success, and the audience was enthusiastic too – the time was not even enough to answer so many questions in 5 minutes.

And what is next with Puli Space? Keep your eyes on the next meetup event – maybe we are going to be there! :)

An "inofficial" video - which, however, missed the beginning - can be watched here (but You're required to master some Hungarian ;-)):

After a month of waiting we are now proud to announce that team Puli Space is an official Google Lunar X Prize contestant. By successfully gathering the required 50 000USD entry fee purely from private and corporate offerings, fulfilling all entry criteria set by the X PRIZE foundation, and signing the Master Team Agreement we are now a team planning to set foot on the Moon within the next few years. And we are really happy about that!

Since our founders first sat together last May, we have gone a long way: in a matter of months Puli Space gathered volunteering professionals from various walks of life. We have established a functioning structure, dealt with legal matters and are currently in the process of preparing a detailed mission plan and designing and building the necessary equipment. With more than 40 contributors to date, backed by nearly 500 individual donators, thousands of fans and various supporting companies we have grown to be an organization that takes the GLXP challenge seriously, and is developing the capability to handle it.

This milestone has been reached after months of hard work, but it was only possible with the help of our supporters: we would like this success to be shared with all members of our Small Step Club, the Puli Launchpad Community, our corporate sponsors, media and cooperation partners and the many others who helped along the way. However, we have just got to the starting line of the racetrack, and even though we are taking a running start we still need all the help we can get: if you think you can help, join us. If you can afford it, donate to us. And if you just like the whole idea, then tell others and us about it. Inspiring comments are the greatest motivation for our team!

From now on you can also find us on the GLXP homepage. Also feel free to check out the X Prize announcement and our press release  (coming soon) on our successful registration. Stay with us, as soon we will introduce some of our rover concepts to the public too!