Another April Fools' Day has come and gone. We might not be able to top this one for some time. Stratofox staged a moon landing.
It's a fitting expansion of our playful side corresponding with hard work that Stratofox has done in the past year assisting with amateur space launches.
This year's April Fools' joke was based on the premise that it needed to have the punchline, "the weasel has landed." About a dozen Stratofox members and some of their friends set out to see if it was really possible to fool anyone, even for a moment, that a fictious organization called "TubeRat Aerospace" had landed a probe on the moon.
Taking matters to an outrageous extreme, the fictitious "Lirpa Sloof Foundation", invented for Stratofox's 2004 April Fools' gag, made a return appearance in this story as the sponsor of the $100 million "LunaCaching Prize". The prize was, of course, also a work of fiction. Coming months after the dramatic winning of the X-Prize by SpaceShipOne and just one week after NASA announced its Centennial Challenges, there was an opportunity to ride the wave of publicity.
So with everything else ready, Stratofox made its announcement.
So what was the result? Was anyone fooled? Amazingly, probably because of considerable attention to detail, we observed online and in person that some people were actually fooled for more than just a few minutes. We had some reports of people who were completely fooled. Some really wanted it to be true, and we apologize for dashing their hopes. Among aerospace engineers, we don't expect any were fooled for even a moment. We also saw cases where people were initially fooled but then noticed what "Lirpa Sloof" spells backwards.
There's a sign that all the work was worth it. Even people who were fooled said afterward that it was cool. In the end, we hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did. There is more behind-the-scenes info and credits at the TubeRat web site.
Meanwhile, without the knowledge of anyone else on the team, Stratofox member Rafael Skodlar KC6LBJ whipped up some text around a "modified" image for his own April Fools joke. The image on his page shows a US Air Force GlobalHawk UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), with the image modified as if it was a Stratofox experiment. Nicely done.
About Stratofox
Stratofox is a hobbyist group based in San Jose, California which performs tracking and recovery of high-altitude rockets and balloons. Most members of the team have Amateur ("Ham") Radio licenses and/or High Power Rocketry certifications. Stratofox earned a place in history when it recovered the CSXT/GoFast Rocket, the world's first amateur rocket launched to space, on May 18, 2004 in rugged mountains 25 miles away from the launch site.
Stratofox is a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the South Bay Community Network (sbay.org). Stratofox's web site is at www.stratofox.org.