Project restructuring, and collaboration with Mach30

After a relatively long period of silence, CSTART is pleased to be able to announce some changes to the structure of our project set and also a new front for close collaboration with the Mach30 Foundation, one of the Friends of CSTART.  These new ideas and directions will hopefully help us to work better toward our goals.

The two current projects, OHKLA and CLLARE, are now schedule to be replaced by a set of 4 new projects.  Although some aspects of the two older projects will still be recognizable in the new projects, there will also be some new elements.  Rather than focusing on specific goals, such as breaking the Karman line or putting people on the moon, these 4 new projects will have a “technological foundations” focus.  Once complete, the 4 foundational projects will result in CSTART having all the necessary technical “building blocks” and frameworks that will be needed for future projects to tackle specific goals.  The 4 foundational projects will also be divided into “stages” of increasing complexity, allowing us to begin by tackling the simplest possible problems within each project’s scope.  Although replacing 2 projects with 4 may actually seem like creating more work for ourselves, we hope that because the 4 projects are more focused on specific technologies than on particular goals, and because the staging system will allow us to start work on comparatively simple systems, the new 4 project system will actually enable us to get more work done, sooner.

The particular details and stage structure of the 4 new projects will be announced on this blog in the near future.  At this point, we will be using our presence on Reddit to hold competitions to name each of the projects and to design logos for each.  These competitions will function in much the same way as our motto selection competition did.  Stay tuned!

In addition to establishing a set of newer, more practical projects, CSTART is also excited to announce that it will be collaborating with the Mach30 Foundation, and other interested parties on the development of a web application designed to support the design of hardware in an open and collaborative manner – somewhat similar to the applications used by projects like SourceForge and Google Code to support the open development of software.  We hope that this new application will allow us to work in a much more organized and transparent manner than our current ad hoc combination of the forums and wiki.  We hope to begin work on building this application in the near future.

Although the new projects will be announced and named soon, we anticipate that actual design and construction work for those new projects will not begin until the web application is ready to support this work.  Some of the new 4 projects are definitely simpler than others.  We hope to bring each of the projects “on line” as soon as the web application is considered ready to support that particular project.  This means that the simplest project could come on quite soon, whereas the most complex project may not see work begin for some time as we gradually expand and test (on simpler projects) the web application.  This approach may hold us back in the short term, but it increases the chances that our projects will work out in the long run.  More announcements about the web application will be made as work takes place.  Those who are especially interested can read the discussion between CSTART and Mach30 about this application in our forums, and can make posts to offer their advice or assistance.

CSTART thanks all of its supporters for their continued interest in and assistance with our work.  We know that at times it seems like the organization is constantly changing its mind or temporarily losing momentum.  The truth of the matter is that open source style design and construction of complicated hardware is a relatively new phenomenon, without much in the way of software or accepted best practice to guide new projects.  There are lots of pitfalls and unexpected complications, and it is taking us time to find our feet.  The fact that our goals are as ambitious as they are does not make things easier!  Please bear with us as we continue to find ways to make things easier.  We hope that with the continued interest, support and work of our community and our fellow open source space teams, we will eventually hit upon a combination of projects, procedures and tools which will let us begin bringing our goals to fruition.

OHKLA propellants decided: to space with polyethylene and nitrous oxide!

The polls for collecting community opinion on propellants for the OHKLA project have closed, with polyethylene (PE) as the fuel and nitrous oxide (N2O) as the oxidizer taking clear majorities of the votes.  This result is entirely in keeping with the opinions expressed in our forum discussions.  The relatively small number of votes cast (although the numbers exceeded the number of people expressing their opinions on the forum, meaning the polls were still worthwhile) combined with the lack of votes for the least popular propellants on the forum suggest that the poll was taken seriously and neither subject to ballot-stuffing nor degenerated into an uninformed popularity contest.  Thus, the choice of PE and N2O can now be considered official (although obviously the choice may be reviewed later in the project if strong community opinion suggests this is necessary).  With this decision made, we are now able to progress to working on design tasks which are dependent upon propellant choice, bringing us closer to a state where we can begin construction on small-scale prototype rocket engines for the OHKLA project.

Since the approach of using a focused forum thread, a community poll and a hard one-week deadline worked so well for determining the OHKLA propellants, it is expected that this same process will be repeated many times in the near future for other design tasks, in an attempt to keep up momentum on the project.  Each time this happens, a blog post will be made, so subscribe to our RSS feed and keep your eyes open!  The coming weeks will be a great time for new people to get involved in the OHKLA project, so if you’ve been lurking but would like to do more, introduce yourself in the forums!

Thanks to everybody who voted in the propellants poll!

Have your say on OHKLA hybrid rocket propellants!

After a period of significant stagnation, in an attempt to breathe new life and momentum into the OHKLA project, it has been decided that a choice of hybrid rocket propellants for that project shall be decided upon by the 23rd of this month.  Making this central design decision will allow us to begin considering many follow-on design decisions and start making preliminary designs, removing a large obstacle to progress on OHKLA.  As always, CSTART looks to its community for guidance on making its decisions, including design decisions.  To this end, this blog entry contains polls on the most popular candidate oxidizers and fuels for the OHKLA project’s suborbital rocket.

Please treat the poll seriously and make your choice carefully.  Ideally, before casting a vote you should:

• Familiarize yourself with the CSTART Social Contract, in particular the section on “Safe and Responsible Operation”,
• Familiarize yourself with the CSTART Design Philosophy,
• Read the relevant OHKLA Design Task page in the Wiki to learn the pertinent issues in choosing a propellant and some of the pros and cons associated with various propellants,
• Read the relevant forum thread to see other CSTARTer’s opinions and concerns about various propellants

If you have hands on experience or expert knowledge of hybrid rocketry, please feel free to edit the Wiki page and contribute to the forum discussions to make sure our community is as widely and accurately informed as possible during the voting period.

Please be aware that while CSTART actively solicits and greatly values the opinions of its community, due to a still fledgling community and a lack of robust software infrastructure, CSTART is not currently operating in a strict, direct democratic manner: the most popular propellants according to this poll will not necessarily be the propellants CSTART commits to using for OHKLA.  The less evidence there is of any kind of ballot-stuffing and the more evidence there is that voters took the task seriously and voted in accordance with the Social Contract, in accordance with the Design Philosophy and using their best technical understanding of the task, the more likely the winning propellants of this poll are to be the propellants actually used.

Voting closes at midnight on the 23rd of June, 2010,  PST.

Oxidizer poll:

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Fuel poll:

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Mach 30 becomes an official friend of CSTART

A few days ago, J. Simmons of the Mach 30 Foundation for Space Development, extended an offer to become a Friend of CSTART, and today CSTART accepted this offer.  Mach 30 is a US-based, non-profit corporation with the ambitious goal of “leading humanity to become a spacefaring civilization”.  Mach 30 contends that “history, as well as the upcoming gap in U.S. human space flight, proves our current space exploration plans aren’t working”, and thus “a totally new approach is required. Rather than wait for the government, Mach 30 is building a community of individuals who, by working together, can take humanity to space”.

Mach 30’s approach is based on three principles, these being sustainable leadership, open design and a mature technology bias.  The commitment to open design (as defined at opendesign.org) makes Mach 30 a clear ideological ally of CSTART, and one of the few open source space operations to impose explicit guidelines for openness on itself (which CSTART does via its Social Contract).  Everyone at CSTART looks forward to a long and mutually rewarding Friendship with Mach 30.

Mach 30 is the fourth official Friend of CSTART, joining Copenhagen Suborbitals, the Open Luna Foundation and the Portland State Aerospace Society.

RIP Denis Grelich

It is with great shock and sadness that the CSTART community has learned of the unexpected passing of one of its active contributors, Denis Grelich, a student of mechatronic engineering from Saarbrücken, Germany.

While Denis only joined CSTART in early Febuary 2010, he quickly established himself as a dedicated member of the team.  In addition to helping with the planning of our appearance at the SpaceUp conference, Denis was a strong advocate for replacing the ad hoc and disorganized manner in which technical decisions for CSTART projects were being made at the time of his arrival with a systematic and principled approach, in which the precise requirements for problems and the rationale for the adopted solutions are clearly documented.  The current efforts in this direction, particularly the work on the CSTART Engineering Process, are a direct response to Denis’ concerns, and CSTART will be better off for implementing these processes sooner rather than later.

The CSTART community offers its sincere condolences to Denis’ friends and family.

CSTART’s roadmap for the upcoming months

CSTART is very excited to announce that it is gearing up for a period of intense organizational activity.  A lot has been happening on the CSTART scene of late, we have received a lot of new members and also a lot of excellent advice and ideas on how to proceed in our ambitious goals.  We hope to act on this advice soon, and the purpose of this post is to outline a lot of the things we hope to tackle in the near future.  We’d like to get as much of what is listed here done by the end of March, and to have all of it done by the end of April!  It will be a time of considerable change, for the better.

First and foremost, we will be returning our full attention to the long-neglected task of becoming a non-profit corporation.  If we choose to incorporate in the United States, the ultimate goal of this effort will be 501(c)(3) tax-exempt certification, so that donations to CSTART will be tax deductible.  The CSTART community contributed very generously last year to raise funds for this effort, and we hope to finally put this money to good use some time very soon.  This will be one of our top priorities for this month.  Once incorporation has been achieved, work can begin on dissolving the current temporary leadership system of acting directors taking on the role of “benevolent dictators” and replacing it with a proper organizational hierarchy, with responsibilities and powers clearly outlined and controlled by formal bylaws.

We also hope to start selling CSTART merchandise soon.  We have spent some time looking at various online store options for this, and we are close to making a final choice (Zazzle.com is looking like a very likely contender at present).  Once this choice is made you should expect to see CSTART tshirts and the like become available in short order.  Naturally, all money raised from the sale of these items will be used to finance further CSTART activities.

Several of our most recent members bring solid experience in graphics, animation, film and related fields to the CSTART community, and there is a lot of excitement at the prospect for both much higher quantities and a much higher quality of online promotional material in the near future.

In addition to the above changes to the team’s legal status and outside appearance, we are also aiming for a major overhaul in our internal organisation.  The process by which plans for CSTART’s projects have developed so far has been extremely ad hoc and informal, and while some great work has been done in this manner, the system is really starting to fray at the edges.  Some parts of the website (like the Wiki) have shown a tendency to get out of date with respect to other parts (like the forums, and documents in our Mercurial repository), new comers to CSTART have had a difficult time getting up to speed on the current state of things, and recent ideas in the forum have made it apparent that we have no clear process for handling the parallel development of different approaches to a project.  Thus we will be devoting a lot of effort in the coming few months to developing some clearly defined, formal processes for project management, data managment and making engineering decisions in an informed, documented fashion.  We will also be both installing and developing open source software to support these processes.  It will be challenging to find a workable system that sits on the fine line between having projets fall apart due to disorganisation and stifling development with overbearing administrative processes, but we will do our best.

These are just some of the most important items on a long list of things we hope to turn our attention to in the immediate future.  Naturally, all of the changes above will happen in the most open and transparent manner possible.  A large IRC meeting in the #cstart channel on the Freenode network is being planned for an upcoming weekend to help facilitate this work: once the date and time of this meeting is decided it will be published in this blog so that any interested people from the community can come along and either offer their advice or opinions, or just watch to see how things work.

Of course, once these organizational issues are sorted out, the community will return its energy to working on our established projects, which are progressing very nicely indeed.

The acting directors of CSTART express their gratitude to all the members of our community who have offered their time, skills and money to help get CSTART off the ground, and look forward to the community’s continued input, help and support as CSTART continues to grow and evolve into the future of space exploration.  Thank you for believing in us!

Portland State Aerospace Society becomes an official Friend of CSTART

Yesterday, Nathan Bergey of the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), an educational aerospace project at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, accepted an offer to become a Friend of CSTART.  PSAS “consists of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff of PSU, and local community members- ranging from high school students to engineers in industry- who are interested in aerospace engineering”.  The team are currently focused on the construction of sophisticated sounding rockets, as a logical precursor to the ambitious goal of microsatellite launch capabilities.  PSAS is also strongly dedicated to an open source approach, with CAD drawings, schematic diagrams and custom written software being made available to anybody who wants it.

This is a very important Friendship from the perspective of the OHKLA project, since the PSAS group have a tremendous amount of knowledge, experience and facilities relevant to high altitude rocket launches, and some degree of previous experience with paraffin-fueled hybrid rockets (paraffin being a current favorite contender for OHKLA).  Close cooperation between CSTART and PSAS on the OHKLA project has the potential to offer an extremely accelerated pace of development for the project, to the benefit of both teams.  Everyone at CSTART is very excited about this possibility and looks forward to a long and mutually rewarding Friendship with PSAS.

PSAS is the third official Friend of CSTART, joining Copenhagen Suborbitals and the Open Luna Foundation.

CSTART talks at SpaceUp

Yesterday, Ben Miller-Jacobson, one of CSTART’s Acting Directors, gave a presentation at the SpaceUp “unconference“, in San Diego, USA. SpaceUp is a conference “open to all, where participants decide the topics, schedule, and structure of the event”, where representatives from many exciting parts of the space industry (from SpaceX to NASA) and enthusiast community (like the Google Lunar X Prize) are discussing anything and everything to do with space that grabs their attention.

Ben’s talk provided a first-time introduction to CSTART, our principles, goals and current projects, to a wide audience of just the kind of people whose help we will need. You can watch a recording of the talk yourself using the embedded Flash player below.

Today Ben will have given less formal presentations on our OHKLA and CLLARE projects to interested conference goers, to give people a clearer idea of what we have done so far and what we hope to do soon.

Downloadable versions of all the CSTART material presented at SpaceUp will be available in .pdf format from this website in the near future. Many thanks are due to the members of the CSTART community who helped us to raise the money required to cover the registration, travel and accommodation costs associated with talking at SpaceUp. Hopefully this event has raised the profile of CSTART amongst space enthusiasts and will bring in eager and talented new members to help us achieve our goals.

Open Luna Foundation becomes an official Friend of CSTART

Today, Paul Graham of the Open Luna Foundation, a US-based non-profit organization which “seeks to return mankind to the lunar surface, first through robotic missions, followed by manned exploration, culminating in an eight person permanent outpost” and intends to make all of their research and technology available in an open source manner, accepted an offer to become a Friend of CSTART.  This event formalizes a cooperative relationship which has existed between the two groups for some time now, and CSTART looks forward to continued collaboration with OLF as we both strive toward our common goals.

The OLF is the second official Friend of CSTART: Copenhagen Suborbitals became the first in late 2009.

CSTART Motto Selection Competition closed, winner announced!

The second phase of the CSTART Motto Selection Competition has ended and the poll is now closed.  Thank you to everybody who voted!

The result of the poll was quite definitive: “Space exploration, by anyone, for everyone” received 51% of the total votes, making it the clearly most popular motto.  You can see the number of votes received for each option by visiting the closed poll.

Effectively immediately, “Space exploration, by anyone, for everyone” is the official motto of CSTART!