William ‘Red’ Whittaker ’73 shoots for the moon
Today’s Wall Street Journal has terrific coverage of William “Red” Whittaker, who with a team of students from Carnegie Mellon is competing for the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize, which will go to the first privately funded team able to get a robot to reach the moon, travel 500 meters and flash data back to the Earth.
Whittaker, who graduated from Princeton in 1973 with a degree in civil engineering, says he has a “very robot-centric view of the universe.” Robots he has created have “crawled into mines and volcanoes, crossed deserts, won a 60-mile road race, helped clean up nuclear waste and harvested alfalfa.”
The Journal portrays Whittaker as a risk-taker — he once wrestled an ape at a carnival — who prefers to undertake projects that “border on the unachievable.” You can watch a video interview with Whittaker, see a slideshow about the spacecraft his team is building to launch the robot, and read the full article here.
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About this blog
EQN is a blog from Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science that highlights faculty, students and alumni who, through innovation and leadership, are changing the world.
Recent Entries
- Starshade deploys for first time
- Hale ’11 and Ohlendorf ’05 shine in the major leagues
- Flood risk study receives $2.3 million Rockefeller Foundation grant
- Ice cream social August 9 to feature vintage technology
- Jennifer Rexford ’91 one of top 10 ‘cloud trailblazers’
- Dan Boneh *96 wins prize for advances in cryptography
- Computer science researchers untangle a hairy problem
- Technology Review: mining cellphone data without violating privacy
- Dean H. Vincent Poor elected fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh
- Bob Kahn wins Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
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