TubeRat Aerospace
Behind the Scenes

Mission Control Video Credits

• Steve Traugott KG6HDQ, let us into his shop
• Joyce Traugott KG6IAN, locked up after we left
• Dave Goodin, director
• Steve Goodin, video assistant
• Aaron Reales video assistant
• Bret Anderson, Inertial Telemetry
• Josh Berry KE6IZQ, Motor Telemetry
• Ian Kluft KO6YQ, Airbag Telemetry
• Justin Rocha KG6SGU, Navigation
• Pat Power WB6RIC, Oscillation Overthruster (sign partially obscured in video)
• Pierce Nichols N1UAY, Weasel Wrangler (sign does not appear in video)
• Catherine Funk, executive/manager standing at back of room

Bret Anderson is a professional Shakesperian actor. We appreciate that he offered his skills for this video.

The script was written by Ian Kluft.

Web Site

It was intended to look like the cheesy over-hype that could be expected from a start-up company.

April Fools Day Distribution

• Dave Masten, blogger
• Pierce Nichols, blogger
• Jon Goff, blogger & mail lists
• Catherine Funk, blogger
• Ian Kluft, mail lists & attempted Slashdot submission
• and everyone tried it out on friends and co-workers

"Zingers" - things intended to give away the joke to observant readers

• "Lirpa Sloof" is April Fools spelled backwards.
• In the video: "The Weasel has landed!"
• The site claims it was launched on a Delta II rocket on Jan 12, 2005. The Delta launched that day carried NASA's Deep Impact probe and no secondary payloads.
• One of the operator position signs in the video (partially obscured) says "Oscillation Overthruster", a reference to the sci-fi comedy movie "Buckaroo Banzai" and re-popularized recently among players of the video game BZFLAG.
• There is no dome-shaped hangar at the Ocean Ridge Airport.
• The EXIF tags in the banner-heading JPEG image say that the picture was taken with a "Canon WeaselShot APR1" camera. Other EXIF tags were preserved from the actual airport photo from before the hangar was added to it.
• The lunar approach video is from the NASA Ranger 8 impactor probe just before impact. We turned it upside-down to make it less recognizable.
• We added stars to the sky in lunar surface photo. In actuality, a camera exposure setting for the brightness of the sunlit surface would not also be able to pick up stars. (You can try this with your own camera at night. You can't photograph stars and well-lit objects in the same frame unless you overexpose the well-lit object. So this sunlit surface photo with stars was an impossible shot that had to have been modified.) We did that just to spite the conspiracy theorists.

Pictures of the Preparations

• The TubeRat headquarters image (a work of fiction, of course)
• Bringing the lunar mural to the shop (3/10)
• Mission Control set construction progress (3/13)
• The Banner goes up (3/18)
• Repositioning the banner (3/19)
• TubeRat filming (3/20)
• TubeRat video editing (3/25)
• Celebrating a successful hoax (4/2)

Final Videos

• 320x240 lower quality (3.2MB)
• 320x240 higher quality (9.7MB)