Many of you may have seen the articles and videos about NASA’s Greased Lightning GL-10 first transition flight earlier this week. If you didn’t see the articles, here is a press release from NASA. And a direct link to the video.

What you may not know is that Bill Fredericks – the guy who has managed the project, and whose voice you hear in the video – is a VSP power user. Bill is often the first one to put new features to the test, break them, and to let us know how we should have done it. He also does a great job teaching intro and advanced modeling techniques at the Workshop.

If you want to read up on the design of the Greased Lightning, there is a great overview paper available on NTRS.  OpenVSP was used to model each of the alternatives and the final OML of the flight vehicle came straight from the OpenVSP geometry!