July 20, 2005
July Grand Challenge Runs

La Mort de Faust
La Mort de Faust, from P. Christian's Histoire de la Magie

The Stanford Grand Challenge Team claims to have traversed all but three miles of last year's 144 mile long course.

CMU's Red Team traveled 200 miles... on a closed race track.

A Princeton team-member claims they “had an 12 hour stress test where we covered all of last year's course, and a little [bit] more”, but that sounds like maybe the vehicle just traveled the same distance as last year's route, not that they actually followed the desert course.

I thought the presence of an endangered turtle species required some sort of special waiver to traverse a portion of last year's course?

Posted by jjwiseman at July 20, 2005 04:49 PM
Comments

The Environmental Impact Statement that DARPA had to fill (hence disclosing the four routes last year) is a requirement. In it, they had to show that in fact they were taking precautionary actions to remove any turtles on the road. This is an exercise for all government agencies to go through if they want to do something that impacts the environment (NASA has to do one for the International Space Station !) My point is that I am not sure this is required from private citizens nor universities. The other point is that for this year, it is likely that they'll either use private lands, reserve lands or DoD land that are not requiring them to make such disclosure in advance. I personnaly bet for New Mexico or they may use one of the other routes for which they had clearance last year, but I have been known to make erroneous judgements ( http://pegasusbridge.blogspot.com/2005/03/how-we-are-going-beat-big-guys-and-win.html ), haven't we all :-)

Posted by: Igor on July 21, 2005 05:23 AM

three words: turtle recognition system.

Posted by: Chris B. on July 21, 2005 09:06 AM
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