CSTART Motto Selection Competition

Happy new year, everybody!  CSTART is kicking off 2010 with a competition!

CSTART needs a motto and in keeping with our open and collaborative spirit, we are going to let the community decide.  Thus, we are excited to announce the CSTART Motto Selection Competition, which opens now. This is your chance to leave a mark on the face of CSTART which could last for decades!

The competition will be conducted using a combination of our /r/tothemoon subreddit and a poll on this blog.  There are two phases of the competition:

The candidate selection phase, which begins as soon as this blog entry is posted and lasts until roughly midnight on the 7th of January 2010: During this week-long phase, anybody and everybody can suggest a motto (or two or more!) by posting a comment on this thread on our subreddit.  There are no restrictions on the mottos you can suggest: we will let upvotes and downvotes by the community weed out trolls and submissions which are considered undesirable or inappropriate by the majority.

The motto selection phase, which will begin immediately after the announcement of the end of the candidate selection phase and last until roughly midnight on the 14th of January 2010.  During this week-long phase, the 5 most upvoted submissions to the Reddit thread will be made the choices for a poll entry in this blog.  Each member of the CSTART community will be able to vote once on one motto from this list of finalists.  The entry which receives the most votes before the closing date will be adopted as the official CSTART motto!

So what are you waiting for?  Post your motto ideas to the Reddit thread now!

Copenhagen Suborbitals becomes the first official Friend of CSTART

Today, Peter Madsen of Copenhagen Suborbitals, a Denmark-based manned suborbital space project with an open source philosophy, accepted an offer to become a Friend of CSTART.  This makes Copenhagen Suborbital the first official participant in our Friends of CSTART program!  The program is intended to help foster a sense of community between open source space projects and to encourage close sharing of ideas and experience, as well as raising awareness and attracting new members to these projects.  The Copenhagen team has had a lot of fantastic success test firing simple-to-build hybrid rocket engines, much like those we hope to use in our projects, so we are looking forward to a very profitable working relationship with them.

Not only have Copenhagen Suborbitals become a Friend of CSTART, but they have made an extremely generous offer for someone from CSTART to visit their workship in Copenahgen and attend a static test firing of one of their rockets, and also to exchange ideas and ask questions of them in person.  CSTART is very keen to take advantage of this excellent opportunity and will do everything in its power to make sure we can do so.

Offers of Friendship have been extended to a number of other groups whom we are still waiting to hear back from.

Welcome!

Welcome to the CSTART blog!

This blog will be used as CSTART’s main outlet for news and other important information about the activities of the CSTART organization and progress on our various projects (but don’t forget about our Twitter feed or Facebook page as well!). Anybody can propose ideas for blog posts or even write entire candidate posts in the appropriate section of our forums. Posts which earn the general approval of the community and meet a few basic suitability criteria will be published to the blog by an administrator.

Less than two months after our spontaneous birth on Reddit, CSTART has expanded and clarified its goals and principles, establishing a strong sense of purpose and identity, with finalised versions of our Mission Statement, Social Contract and Design Philosophy now published to the Wiki.  We are now seeking to expand both awareness of CSTART and our active membership so that we can work faster and with more competence toward our goals. To this end, we have initiated contact with a number of other groups engaged in space exploration or research under an open source philosophy, as part of our Friends of CSTART program, and are waiting to hear back from them. Our preparation toward incorporating so that we can obtain tax exemption status is also continuing – you can follow the discussion on this topic in our forums.

Stay tuned!