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A more complex example: what about CAD packages?  FEA?  CFD?  As far as I understand, commerical packages are much more suited to actual tasks.  [I hope no OpenFOAM, etc. users/fans jump on me for thsi!]

Hello, and welcome. I hope you are still following along. I have devoting most of my time with CSTART to working with OHKLA. I was away recently, but am slowly coming back to designing the rocket, and I hope that you will also contribute.'

As for CAD, I have been using Pro/E. Mostly because this is what is most easily accessible to me. I also have access to a few other applications, but not many. What are you most familiar with?

As for FEA/CFD, I have been using Ansys. In the past, I have done things such as determining an optimized nozzle geometry for the fluid flow of combusted fuel. This would have to be redone once we determine final lengths and diameter. It would be great to have your input on this as well.

The current state is that we do utilize proprietary CAD and FEA packages, but we also try to share the models via our google code project, which is far outdated and could use an update once more design decisions have been made.

I understand that a lot of restructuring is going on, but I am also keen on developing OHKLA in parallel, if possible.

I don't know a tremendous amount about the various chemical and physical processes involved in most ISRU ideas.  I believe it is true that all the elements will have different resonant frequencies, I suppose the question is how high those frequencies get for the sorts of elements that are present in regolith, and whether generating RF at those frequencies would place realistic demands on power supply, etc.

ISRU is interesting in that, to some extent, it's something you can plan for and practice on Earth for (relatively) low cost.

I think the currently proposed set of 4 projects based around foundational technology actually provide a sufficient tree root or set of roots to cover just about everything.  The rocketry project covers, well, rocketry, the CubeSat project will cover vacuum electronics, comms, etc. and the minimal manned spaceflight project will cover things like life-support and heat shielding.  Between those bases I think by scaling things up we could cover most applications, certainly minimal space stations.

The one thing which comes to mind as being completely not covered yet is robotics.  Presumably at some stage down the road we will be looking at things like very basic rovers, sort of reminiscent of the miniature rovers people are proposing for the Google Lunar X Prize.  We don't have anything to cover this yet.  This probably isn't a big problem because it's quite a distant goal, and also I suspect perhaps less amenable than other technologies to standardisation (in that different landing locations and mission purposes could require radically different concepts).  Still, something to think about.

If nothing else, a tech tree could be, like you said, a compelling way to visually represent the interactions between all the projects.

Thanks a tonne for that hackerspaces.org link!  It seems like a hackerspace has finally opened up in my city since the last time I checked!  I'll definitely check out their next meeting.  If it seems like a good place and that people might be interested, I may bring up CSTART.

I recalled that one of the problems in the original moon missions was a build-up of lunar dust that was highly abrasive, being attracted to the astronauts and their equipment because it was photo-ionised.

I've seen the entries for NASA's lunar mining robot contest, and it occurred to me that this property might be exploited, and avoid readily wearing moving parts too!

I imagine a mining craft moving to a certain position and embedding a spike or auger into the bedrock to ground it, then extending either a directional funnel or "trunk" lined with panels to electro-statically attract the lunar dust. Essentially hoovering it up.

I suspect with careful design, electrical fields could at once draw the dust down the collector and repel it from it's surfaces. Possibly some sort of peristaltic motion.

Actually processing the dust is another matter entirely, though I have wondered since there is a hydrogen resonant frequency (as exploited in microwave cookers), there must be resonant frequencies for other elements. And perhaps in a low-gravity and electro-statically confined environment, this could be used to create some sort of microwave fractional distillation column?

Depending on the dust content though, perhaps it could simply be printed and sintered into 3D objects? Or a combination of the two; separating into various powders for more precise sintering, etc.

If the latter is possible, by combining both in one machine it could drastically reduce the amount of equipment requiring transport to the lunar surface to set up automated manufacture there.

In basic terms it's quite simple; a sub-orbital rocket leads to an orbital rocket, which leads to a satelite, which leads to a bigger one, which leads to a space station.. etc, etc.. But many require parallel/combined advancements such as vacuum-functional electronics or life-support systems. They also nesessitate a larger cost in materials and labour.

Man-hours are the best way of handling the latter, as it means the more people are working on it the less time it takes.

So it would need to combine; tech-level development, manufacturing ability, production man-hours and material cost.

(Strictly speaking there's probably legal aspects in there as well, to do with legally launching, testing and handling certain materials in the various countries.)

Getting into more specific terms, each aspect would probably have it's own development tree with it's own dependencies. A certain componant may require manufacturing with a particular tollerance, and doing that may require a particular class of machine and operator skill.

Beyond here, any RTS game strategy falls apart, as we don't have the luxury of simply building up our production capacity and having the fully functional new tech designs fall in our laps. But as a general guide to how the balance of each development is progressing, it could maybe make a compelling visual draw?

(I probably should set up a workshop listing somewhere to reference people to.)

Regarding the hackerspaces, since we already have a google map with member locations marked, perhaps someone could create a map or overlay showing the hackerspaces too, so people are readily aware of their closest ones? http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/L.....ker_Spaces

It seems like you've already been making a few posts around the place, which is good to see.  It's especially good that you've read a recent post of mine more or less outlining the current situation.  In light of this I'll skip over doing the usual introductory hold-handing that we often do when someone new turns up, and just encourage you to keep reading and posting all over the site to the extent that it interests you.

Your suggestions are very welcome and seem entirely sensible.  I particularly like the idea of allying with hacker-spaces.  This is something that it would be good to look into once we've got our current direction made a little more clear (which will happen very soon).  It's great to see someone perceive strenghts and potential in CSTART!

My name's Peter, but everyone calls me Sci these days. I'm a long-time space enthusiast and something of a "futurist" I suppose. I'm a self-employed inventor/maker from East London, England.

I have composite engineering skills and a functional workshop. Relevant to this arena, I'm developing my own variation on the Mendel RepRap; the Bonsai Repstrap. I also have several items of vacuum equipment, beyond simple degassing chambers.

I have a sturdy stainless ex-production chamber with many ports that would be well suited to detailed vacuum testing of small items. I also own an 18" diameter steel bell jar from an old vacuum coater. Both require some work to get operational, and are both on my "to-do" list, for testing some of my own space-travel related ideas. I also have a functional turbomolecular vacuum pump system, so should be able to achieve a vacuum pressure of 5x10^-5 IIRC.

Rapid prototyping in vacuum is of particular interest to me.

On a personal note, I have seen a lot of space-promoting web forums come and go. It seems enthusiasm is often lost rapidly when the magnitude of the task at hand is confronted.

However I can see there are differences in this group that may prove crucial in preventing this.

The open-source approach promotes openness to outside ideas. I have already seen a thread proposing "adopting" the apparently stalled CubeSat project. I find this a very refreshing idea that I can get behind. Too many groups wish to doggedly do things their own way from scratch, in an apparent need to prove themselves over actually achieving the goals. And again, operating alone, this seems to promote rapid collapse of those groups due to overload.

I fear the biggest challenge to overcome is the one of the people involved. Motivation, organisation, cooperation, conquering personal egos, etc..

There also seems to be the issue of too much theory, too little application. People planning things out and never actually making the physical objects required.

Again this project seems very resistant to this in it's stance of keeping things simple and using off-the-shelf parts.

So, if I may offer my initial suggestions;

• Consolidate what is already here - Make the forum welcoming and social, get standard introductory documents in place. Expand moderator team as required. Likewise, team leaders for individual projects may well help spread the load.
• Expand by looking for other small similarly-minded groups and either offer to absorb, combine, ally or otherwise join forces so the overall manpower available comes closer to critical mass. The low-traffic near-dead groups would seem prime targets. A "press pack" would seem to be a useful tool for this.
• Expand material and machining power base. Possibly by allying with hacker-spaces and local maker groups, but also promote grass-roots engineering skills and for people to create their own workshops for practical application and testing of the ideas. This would also help in pushing people to RL meetings and further deepening the sense of community, as well as critical communication redundancy.
• A dependency study would be useful for working out what key items need to be resolved for projects to progress.

I hope they don't come across as arrogant, but I've had some time to consider the flaws of many web projects, and it does sound like this one could both avoid them and benefit from them.

Hi Ryne,

Thanks for your interest and willingness to help!

I'm sorry to say that you are probably going to have a hard time catching up on everything - this is entirely our fault, not yours.  CSTART is in somewhat poor shape at the moment.  Organising a project of this scale in an ad hoc and distributed manner over the internet is difficult.  People have come and gone since we first formed, the goals and organisation of projects has shifted, and at all times the site and Wiki have lagged slightly beyond what is currently the true state of affairs.

Here is a quick attempt to catch you up:

A lot of the earliest or most involved members have left or at least significantly reduced the amount of the time (either by choice or due to external circumstances) they devote to CSTART.  This lack of resources and some lack of agreement on strategic directions resulted in us stagnating a little bit.  Recently, I (as one of 5 founding members) have been trying to act fairly unilaterally (with some support from the community) to get us back on a definite track.  As an essential part of this I have proposed a new suite of 4 projects to effectively replace our previous 2 (OHKLA and CLLARE, which you will find the Wiki dominated by).  The new suite is in some sense a scaling up of OHKLA, a scaling down of CLLARE, and an addition of some new things.  You can read a bit about the new suite and its motivations in this forum thread.  Recently there has been some work done on getting public pages for these new projects built.  In parallel with this restructuring of our projects, we have been talking with another open space organisation Mach 30 about developing some software to coordinate working on open source hardware projects over the internet.  This is tricky and relatively novel, and in the past CSTART has tried to "wing it" using combinations of forums, Wikis, IRC meetings and polls, to mixed but generally less than optimal results.  We are hoping that a struture software platform will help us do much better in this regard.  So the most likely path forward for the org now seems to be that we (i) set down a clear and structured plan for our early projects (with the suite of 4 projects discussed above) (ii) then spend time working not on those projects but on a web app to help guide our engineering work (iii) then use that web app to begin work on the 4 early projects.  Hopefully we can also come up with something for non software development types to work on during stage (ii) above to help keep people involved, but that's an emerging front and we can't say much about it yet for sure.

Please feel free to ask any questions at all as you poke around the site and try to get an idea of what is going on here.  Like I said, it's a bit of a mess and you may well get confused, but we are all too happy to help you out if you ask.  We are really desperate for talented and committed people so will go to great lengths to help get people "inducted" into CSTART.

I hope you don't mind my interjecting here, but @Luke, have you concidered editing this into an official introduction thread and pinning/stickying it for other newbies?

"A genuine effort will be made to ensure that all computer files used in
the planning, design and construction of CSTART missions, rockets and
spacecraft shall be in non-proprietary formats which can be meaningfully
viewed and modified using software which satisfies the Free Software
Foundation's Free Software Definition. Should this not be achievable without significantly impairing CSTART's ability to achieve its mission,
a genuine effort will be made to ensure that the software required to
meaningfully view and modify these files shall be available to the
public free of charge. Dependence on software which is both proprietary
and expensive shall be considered only as a last resort."

So we are allowing (and have, indeed, engaged in) the use of non-free engineering software (e.g. we've made use of ProEngineer before) where practicality demands it, but whenever there is a sufficiently good quality free alternative, we are supposed to use that preferentially.

Any software we write ourselves is constrained by the Social Contract to be free:

All computer code written by CSTART for planning its operations and
installation on rocket and spacecraft computers or on ground control
computers will be available under licenses such that it satisfies the
Free Software Foundation's Free Software Definition.

Hope this answers your question. :)