This work is not intended for sale. You may freely view the text and movie online. Though not for sale, this text and movie are copyrighted by Mike Blackstone. They are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons license:
Generation Zero: My Best Job Ever by Mike Blackstone is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
If you’re thinking of copying or using anything in this work, follow the link to the license for a plain-language description of its terms.
If you’re just reading/viewing, please proceed to Generation Zero, Part 1.
Here is the table of contents:
- Part 1 – My Best Job Ever
- Part 2 – Lunar “Dust”
- Part 3 – JPL Robotics, 1972
- Part 4 – The Robot
- Part 5 – The System
- Part 6 – Demo Scenario
- Part 7 – Filming the Demo
- Epilog – Other JPL Work
- The Demo Movie
You can watch an animation of the demo at Vimeo: Generation Zero: The Demo
Everything here is based on my memory of those days; I have practically no documentation. If anyone has information about any artifacts of the rover project, I would love to hear about them.
If you absolutely MUST have a printed (paperback) copy (the pictures are monochrome, and the demo movie is a 4,823-page flip-book), contact the publisher.
Update July 12, 2018: After I shared this story with Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society, she invited me to submit a summary as a guest blogger. You can read it at their site.