Getting the ball rolling again | General | Forum

Hi everyone,

Our forums have been quiet for a long time, and productive work on our projects has pretty much stopped.  In recent days, rpulkrabek has been making posts on /r/tothemoon on Reddit, and he seems to have managed to reignite some enthusiasm.  Even long-silent old time CSTARTers seem to feeling ready to take another crack at getting CSTART moving.  I'm glad to see this momentum gathering.  I'm not going to be able to contribute to it much personally because I'm exceptionally busy with PhD stuff at the moment, and I'm going to be doing a lot of travelling in the next few months as part of that, but since I've kind of slipped into the position of "de facto leader" of CSTART, I wanted to start up some dialogue about how to get the most out of this brewing new enthusiasm, and share some of my ideas on what could help make things work.

First of all, as promised in the latest blog entry, in the next day or two I will make the blog post publically outlining the new 4 project system which seems to have good consensus support.  This will facilitate the starting of naming and logo contests, which if nothing else are good for raising awareness and getting the community excited.  Once names are chosen we can make public the project landing page which was posted in the forums a while ago and got some good feedback.

Beyond this, I think the following ideas could yield results:

• As previously discussed, we should pick a date and time for weekly IRC meetings, and this time and date should be clearly advertised on the website.  Reminders should be posted on the Reddit and Twitter for each meeting.  After each meeting, a log should be uploaded to somewhere on cstart.org and a link to the log should be posted on Reddit and Twitter.  There should be one or two deisgnated people who have the duty to ensure this is done.  This should be taken relatively seriously.  Obviously it's not a "real job", but ideally there should be people with enough dedication to kind of treat it as one.
• Maybe each of the 4 projects should also have weekly or fortnightly IRC meetings?  If this happens, reminders and logs should be Serious Business, just like the general CSTART meetings.
• Each of the 4 projects should have one, or perhaps a few, people who are designated "leaders" or "representatives".  These wouldn't be authoritarian positions of any kind, but would basically be responsible for helping projects to keep moving.  Each project representative should be committed to turning up to all (or at least the solid majority of) the CSTART IRC meetings and any IRC meetings specific to that project, and also keeping the appropriate section of the Wiki roughly up to date.  Perhaps we should also require each project leader to make one blog post every  month keeping people informed of progress on that project, indicating future directions and highlighting any particular questions that need answering or skill sets we are looking for.  The project representatives should also be people who are willing to direct new-comers to their project.
• Entirely separate of any of the projects, there should be a group of people who work on our ODE design web app, both from a software development perspective and from the perspective of coming up with good project management frameworks, etc.  It's important that we get something like this in place relatively soon.
• Incorporation would, as always, be great.  I think perhaps we should consider more actively recruiting for board positions, from people outside of the current CSTART community.  Ideally, the people on the board will have relatively little power and not much to do with day to day internet-based activities of CSTART.  They should be there to do the bare minimum of legally required stuff to keep the operation running and not much else.  In light of this, it is not important that these people be especially technologically savvy.  It's much more important they are business savvy.  Maybe we should be looking for people who have some previous experience with 501(c)3 corporations (of any kind), some degree of interest in / passion for space, and who are in a situation to commit fairly strongly to their position (i.e. not students who will become unavailable around exam time etc.).  The idealist.org site might be a good place to advertise/recruit for these positions.  If multiple people are interested in the same position we should get each to make a blog or forum post introducing themselves and outlining their relative expertese, and the community can vote people in.

What do people think?  Does anyone have any other ideas on how to help pick up our apparent new burst of enthusiasm and run with it?

rpulkrabek said:

Four project areas are a lot to cover, though. I think some recruitment is needed in order to make sure each corner is progressing. I also think there will need to be one overall leader who makes sure that one program is not diverting too far from the others and that each program continues to progress. So, I see that we should have an overall leader, and then a leader for each of the four programs.

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What exactly do you mean by "one program diverting too far from the others"?  Do you mean that one program is making design decisions which might lead to incompatibility with the products of other programs later on when we try to combine them?  Or just that one program is advancing faster than others?  I think the former could be a real problem, but not the latter so much.

I have no objection in principle to there being some kind of overall supervisory position, provided that, if this position is to have any kind of authority over the individual projects, then it should be not one person but a council with an odd number of people which cannot act at all without the agreement of a majority of its members.

That sounds fine.

Some other ideas:

• A group of interested people could get together as a sort of temporary task force to help brainstorm ideas for fund raising.  The idea would be to think of as many ways as possible that we could make make money off of our four new projects, and do a little research on each idea – has anybody else done them before, etc?  The end result would just be a written report, which could be used later on to help guide more serious efforts to actually implement those ideas.
• A group of interested people could get together as a sort of temporary task force to help brainstorm project ideas which would be possible once the 4 groundwork projects are involved.  The idea would be to think of as many useful scientific or exploratory missions which we could do use the technology the 4 groundwork projects develop, starting with the simplest (i.e. those which require no new technology after those 4 at all) and slowly getting more complicated (i.e. things we could do with the 4 base projects tech plus a little bit extra).  This would basically get people excited, might reveal some important factors we should take into account with the 4 base projects, and could be used later on to help guide decisions on future projects.

Both of these efforts could be run with very high independence from any other parts of the organisation, which is potentially quite attractive.

Post edited 11:00 pm – September 29, 2010 by Luke Maurits

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Hi Dave,

Thanks very much for your recent posts.

To be perfectly blunt, CSTART has not previously been anywhere near as organised, in terms of rank structure, etc. as it would need to be for me to give good responses to most of your questions.  This has, I suppose, been for two reasons.  Firstly, we have traditionally been quite wary of authority and have prefered to have decisions made by consensus – we've certainly openly acknowledged the fact that there will be times where this won't work and we'll need some kind of genuine top-down authority, but so far we've been reluctant to actually implement it.  Secondly, all of our projects have (and the new project structure does not change this much, except possibly for PROJECT BALLOON) been so far away from construction ready that it hasn't seemed prudent to worry about construction and financing when there is still loads more research and design to be done.

Essentially, authority in the organisation has worked like this: 5 people, myself being one of them, founded CSTART, and we essentially became "benevolent dictators", with the explicit promise being that as the organisation progressed we would eventually disolve these dictator positions with a proper hierarchy.  However, things never took off enough for us to facilitate us.  A lot of those initial 5 have since considerably lost interest and/or time to contribute and really only 2 of us, myself and rpulkrabek, have been actively working on the projects for a while.  I have become a sort of "de facto overall leader", although reluctantly and solely for the purpose of keeping CSTART alive.  So if anybody was to be called the centroid of everything, it would be me.  I'm a mathematician by training, but I finished half a physics major before switching to maths, and a self-taught programmer.  I have, for all intents and purposes, no manufacturing/maching skills (not that I'm opposed to learning if I ever get the time and money).

As mentioned above, as part of our current attempt to get the ball rolling again, we are leaning quite strongly toward appointing more people to positions of, if not authority, then at least responsibility, on a per-project basis to hopefully keep things rolling.  As you would have read, we've talked about having people in managerial/administrative type positions to facilitate this, but I've lately been thinking that it would be good for each project to have some sort of technical oversight committe.  I've had in mind a structure rather similar to a lot of open source software projects, where a relatively small number of people have "committer priveleges" for the project, and a larger, informal body of developers who do work which is approved/improved/incorporated by the committers, with committers offering commiter status to non-committers who have demonstrated consistent good work.  Translating this to hardware, we might have a group of experienced engineers who are authorised to actually make design decisions etc., with a wider community providing ideas, doing calculations etc. under their oversight.

If we ended up doing this, I would suggest that you would be an absolutely ideal candidate to hold such a position for PROJECT ROCKET (and any others you may be interested in).  Would you be interested in this?  There's no pressure and also a tonne of flexibility.  It sounds like you have experience and resources that we desperately need, in a quantity that we haven't seen before in anybody else who has expressed interest in the project.  Any thoughts you might have on rank structures etc. we might adopt and where you might fit into them which would maximise the amount of good work you could do for us would be extremely welcome and taken entirely seriously.

A largely similar situation can be said to exist with regard to finances.  We've wanted a CSTART bank account for some time, if nothing else so we can accept donations, sell t-shirts etc.  But to get an account in the organisation's name, we'd need to incorpoate.  We did all the leg work for this a long time ago – investigating what forms need to be filled out and what the fees are, etc.  We even raised the money to incorporate.  What was lacking was anybody deeply involved in the project who lived in the US (ruling out me, an Australian, and rpulkrabek, an American currently living in Finland) who was willing to help us out with things like setting up a PO Box, making a few phonecalls.  As soon as we can get that done we'd be in a position to have a real treasurer, finance group, etc.  If your wife would be at all interested in helping us out in a capacity like this, I'm pretty sure we could accommodate that.

Basically, we are right now lacking in organisational structure, but are ready to change that because it is clearly necessary.  We are very open to ideas you might have on how best to go about this, very thankful for the interest you and your wife have shown and willing to accept any and all help you want to offer.  As the centroid / "head friendly dictator" I'm happy to push through whatever sort of structure will help us make the greatest and fastest progress toward our goals.

If you don't mind my asking, one, where are you located geographically, and two, are you "sealab" on Reddit?

Post edited 6:26 pm – September 30, 2010 by Luke Maurits

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Dave said:

As mentioned rockets is an interest but not my only one! To get to the rockets, I need to go through my own idustrial revolution. I have a variety of ideas that could obtain (if sold) a vast amount of money. One such first project is the solar car challenge run in Australia from Darwin to Alice springs. I live and work in Brisbane, Australia.

From this solar car I am hoping to advertise not only my company Bombardier (Multi billion dollar company in both rail and aerospace engineering) but my own and now possibly CSTART.

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Ah, so you own Bombardier? I've seen that name on equipment and uniforms etc. in association with Adelaide's rail system.

Can you clarify your last sentence in the quote above, please? Did you leave a word out after "own"? Anyway, if you want to use a non-space-related project, like a solar car, to advertise CSTART, I don't think anybody here would have a serious problem with that, as long as it was made clear that CSTART wasn't actually involved in the design of that car or anything.

Dave said:

Now this would be a money spinner and also give CSTART engineering a chance to learn design and collabrate. But, the rocket is the final goal! The other main project work that I will be doing will only be discussed in a private conference with certain members involved with CSTART engineering projects.

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Could you clarify this too, please, particularly the part about learning design? CSTART is happy to accept donations of money produced by your solar car project if that is something you are interested in doing, but I don't really think it is appropriate for CSTART to be involved, in an official capacity, with a solar car project. Of course, if individual memebers of CSTART want to also be members of your solar car project, or any other project they like, they are completely free to do so, and the transfer of skills acquired from said projects to CSTART projects would be a great thing indeed. But I do think it is essential to keep it clear that CSTART is an open source space organisation and not any kind of general engineering group.

Dave said:

Rockets of any substantial size to carry decent payloads are large and require exotic materials with thermal stress tolerant alloys and ceramics. Precision maching and welding are a must and should not ever be considered evil. CSTART wants to build a rocket to go to the moon… well CSTART needs to get really serious about construction techniques.

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If the comment about precision machining being considered evil is in refernce to our Design Philosophy, it is possible you have misunderstood what was meant. The idea has never been that precision machining must be avoided at all costs – the design philosophy explicitly states that there is such a thing as a necessary evil. The sentiment was that we should only use designs which require precision machining etc. if this is truly necessary for the project to succeed. If there are two feasible ways to solve a problem, and one involves precision machining and the other doesn't, CSTART will avoid the precision machining, for good and obvious reasons. However, if there's only one way to solve a problem and it requires precision machining (and, sure, this will happen frequently, especially with rockets etc.) then we'll solve the problem in that way.

Dave said:

This area I am happy to be in charge of plus I am very willing to talk with you guys regarding the rockets design. My wife will be looking after any and all projects that either me or my team undertake….Cstart is my design team.

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Once again, I think some clarification would be helpful here, particularly with regard to the idea of CSTART being "your design team". There are ultimately two ways that stuff designed by CSTART may get built and used. Because all of our designs are CC licensed and patent free, if anybody anywhere in the world wants to build them of their own accord, with their own resources and money, they are absolutely free to do so – we can't legally stop them and that's the point. However, we'd also like to see some of our stuff actually built and used by the CSTART organisation, and people who affiliate themselves with the project can take part in doing that, but this is a significantly different situation, in that what is being built in such an arrangement is property of CSTART and subject to CSTART's control. For example, if someone has the resources, skill and willingness, we might ask them (and provide some funding/equipment if we have it) to, say, solder up some electronics for one of our projects and then mail the finished product to someone else on the other side of the world who has volunteered to build the nose cone and payload mount of a rocket, so that they can integrate the two pieces.

Which of these sorts of approaches did you have in mind? If you want to "work for" CSTART and help the organisation build and operate what it designs, then for you to take charge of construction on some projects and your wife to take care of finances on those projects would involve you and her being members of the appropriate groups for the appropriate projects. We're perfectly willing to have you fill those roles if you want to as long as you understand and are happy with the fact that this doesn't put you in full control/ownership of what is built. On the other hand, if you basically want to be a "private builder/owner/operator" of CSTART designed products (which is what I think "CSTART being your design team" sounds more like), then naturally you and your wife can be in complete control of anything you like without having to worry about official roles in CSTART or abiding by any of our organisational rules, decisions, etc. Of course, there is nothing to stop private builders/owners/operators also contributing to design as part of CSTART if they want to. In fact, we'd welcome that tremendously because we'd be getting feedback from people who are actually building things.

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Dave said:

Maybe it is time for a phone call to have a better chat regarding this project…

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I'm happy to talk to you on the phone some time if you would like to flesh things out in that way. I'm in Adelaide so it wouldn't be especially expensive or difficult in terms of time zones. I will say upfront though that I probably won't agree to anything over the phone – even though I've floated into the status of de facto leadership for CSTART, I still like to run major decisions past whoever is around at the moment.
 

Hi Dave,

Great to hear from you again.  Thanks for clearing up some of my confusion.  The way you'd like to work with CSTART sounds fantastic, and I think I can safely speak for everyone when I say we'd love to have you working with us in this capacity.  It's also good to have another Australian onboard – who knows, perhaps we could end up doing our launches from Woomera?

I only have a little time to write a quick reply just now, so I just wanted to address a few things quickly, all technical issues, since that's the fun stuff:

• I was recently forwarded a copy of one of the emails you sent to info@cstart.org.  In it you said that you "have

  no interest in building a rocket that is not powered by liquid fuel".  I just wanted to check: are you aware that CSTART is fairly strongly committed to hybrid rockets at this point?  Hybrid rockets have solid fuel but liquid oxidiser (or, sometimes, vice versa).  Are you still interested because of this?  We chose hybrids (and so have most other small rocketry companies, university teams, etc.) for a number of reasons, including cost, safety and simplicity.  There was fairly good agreement that hybrid rockets help meet the CSTART Social Contract and Design Philosophy conditions better than solid or liquid rockets.

• You asked "what is the maximum height that CSTART would like to reach with the first launch? 100km/ 60 miles up?".  We will ultimately be aiming for suborbital (>100km) to begin with before maybe one day going orbital, but we will probably want to do smaller launches first.  We have so far been talking as if we'll design a rocket for 100 km (based on simulations, etc.) and then build 1/3 and 2/3 scale versions of it, just so we can cut our teeth on smaller things.
• You asked "Is CSTART looking at using turbo pumps or expanding gas bladders (or
  similar) to force/ control the rate at which the fuel is delivered to
  the combustion chamber?".  We ruled out the use of turbopumps from the very start due to their extreme cost and complexity.  We made the choice to use nitrous oxide as the oxidiser for our rockets because it is self-pressurising: if you put liquid N2O in a sealed vessel at room temperature, some of it boils off, so that a bubble of gas forms at the top of the vessel, increasing pressure.  This processes continues until the pressure is high enough that the remaining liquid no longer boils at room temperature.  From memory this happens at around 4 MPa, but I might be wrong on that, if anyone wants to correct me go ahead.  The true values are around on the forum somewhere.  Anyway, was considered attractive because it means we can just open the valve and the oxidiser will force itself out.  If we'd gone with, e.g. LOX as an oxidiser instead, we'd need a separate pressurisation system using nitrogen or some other inert gas – extra complexity, which is something we really want to cut down on.
• You asked "Has CSTART discussed the required materials…".  A while ago we did an investigation on whether we should use steel or aluminium for our combustion chamber and oxidiser tanks.  We calculated the total mass of the rocket on both assumptions and found that aluminium was lighter by a much larger factor than any of us intuitively expected, so we can take that as a given.  We did choose a particular alloy too, one which we had found a lot of other hybrid rocket projects using, but I forget the number at the moment – rpulkrabek can probably tell you.