On my future involvement and on directions for the org | General | Forum

Post edited 10:59 pm – June 28, 2010 by Luke Maurits

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Hi everyone,

Kind of a long post today, sorry!

Here are my current plans for my future involvement in CSTART:

1. I am going to move mainly away from playing any sort of engineering role.  This is because, in addition to having less and less time to learn new stuff, I have been doing more reading on hybrid rocketry, not in theoretical textbooks, but in the websites of people who actually build rockets in their garage, and am increasingly realising that my booksmarts are really less of the complete picture than I thought, and that I really know too little about actual physical hardware and how stuff is built to be acting as confidently as I am.  In leading the direction of design decisions on OHKLA I am surely overlooking things which really shouldn't be.  We need to find more people with more experience (getting Nick more involved would be a good way forward on this front).  As I move away from engineering in general I will start doing more organisational work (detailed below), since the organisation desperately needs this.  There will be one exception to this, however:
2. I am going to try to get Sampo, the author of OpenRocket who posted here a while ago to let me work with him on improving OpenRocket to the point that it is suitable for use with OHKLA, as a USOFS replacement.  This will cause me to learn a lot about rocket stability and aerodynamics, which is currently our weakest point with regard to OHKLA and so a sensible thing to focus on.  This work is entirely maths-and-programming driven, so it's somewhere where I can feel confident that I actually know what I'm doing.
3. On to organisational stuff: I am going to start working now on the long-discussed web app to help us actually work on our projects in a structured manner, since it's clear we're not going to get to this stage any other way.  I hope to make this my major contribution to CSTART, and to make fairly rapid progress on this front by using a PHP framework I am already familiar with (although actual deployment is going to rely on being able to get in touch with Rizwan and get his cooperation, which could be difficult).  As part of this effort I think I am going to try to introduce more of a leadership structure on our projects – having seen how effective me making unilateral decisions on OHKLA's direction was.

Here are some of my feelings on the organizational front.  These are fairly strong feelings.  They involve defining new projects (although nothing that hasn't been proposed before), but honestly, so be it.  The usual arguments against this are largely invalid – worrying that having lots of projects we're not progressing on will make us look bad seems stupid given that currently we look pretty much as bad as we possibly can.  The new projects that this proposal adds are simpler than the existing projects anyway, so if anything they should increase our rate of progress.  More low-barrier projects should better help us retain new members.  Nobody has any other ideas on how to fix things, anyway.

1. I think we should reinstantiate the CubeSat project.  This is absolutely the quickest and cheapest route to CSTART actually getting something into orbit, which should be a logical milestone for us to aim for early on.  It is a cheap and easy, relatively speaking, way to get a lot of the knowledge and experience we would need for CLLARE and we should be focusing on stuff like this before CLLARE, even if it is less glamorous.
2. I think we should immediate instantiate the discussed high altitude balloon project.  The reasons for this are myriad:
   1. It is the easiest and cheapest thing we can possibly do which is actually space-related.  It will yield visible progress with impressive photos in little time for little cost, which will help us gain attention and credibility.  If we can't pull this off we won't be able to pull anything else off, so it should be our first step.
   2. It can provide support to OHKLA, by way of letting us test avionics, parachutes, recovery procedures, etc. without having working rockets.
   3. It can provide support to the CubeSat project, by way of letting us test electronics, practice using ground stations, etc. without having working rockets.
   4. It can provide an easy source of revenue via JPA-style advertising offers.

   I also think we should make a point of physically locating this project somewhere.  We should post our intention to start the project on /r/tothemoon and ask people who are interested in working on it to comment on it with their physical location (state/city) and also any relevant experience.  As soon as we get more than, say, 5 people in the same general area, we can declare that area the home of the project.  Those people can meet and work on this in the flesh (although of course things should be reported back to all of us via the web).  People with the most experience can get a weak leadership position to keep this project on track.  This increased organisation, combined with the vastly decreased engineering challenges of the project, should guarantee good progress.  We should absolutely be able to be doing routine launches and recoveries by the end of this year.  If we can't we may as well just give up.

3. I think we should mothball CLLARE and start a simpler manned spaceflight project.  This simpler project should have a clear, stage-driven plan.  The first stage is to build the CM only and do a suborbital launch, nothing more.  This stage would basically be on-par with Copenhagen Suborbitals, or the Ansari X-Prize.  It's the bare-minimum a group can do in manned spaceflight, and by aiming for this first we are not putting ourselves in advance of a lot of other groups and thus inviting ridicule.  Subsequent stages can include the development of the OM, orbital flights using Falcon rockets, etc.  A circumlunar flight feels like a sensible stopping point.  No stage of this project should have any work done on it until the previous stage is complete, except to the extent that is required to ensure inter-operability.  The goal of CLLARE (which under this plan we would not work on until this first simpler project is complete) can then be to use the knowledge and hardware from this first program to establish a lunar outpost (with a simple flag-style landing perhaps being the first stage).  This makes CLLARE actually worthwhile long term, rather than simply being a stunt (an awesome and inspiring stunt, but a stunt nevertheless) it can be an actual effort at moving toward moon colonisation.  Rather than just landing, flagging and out, we should, say, first test the lander by having an unmanned cargo variant dump a whole lot of food and water and an inflatable tent.  Then we can do a manned landing at the same spot and someone can stick it out there as long as they can – honest to God balls-of-steel exploration in the name of science, in the spirit of the polar explorers!
4. I think we should expand OHKLA into a general hybrid rocketry program.  A minimalist suborbital flight could be the first (or perhaps even second, after something like a 5 km flight to cut our teeth) stage in this program, but we should continue past it, and state our intention to do so from the start.  Obvious steps along the way should be a hybrid rocket large enough to do suborbital flights of the CM of the simple manned spaceflight project discussed above – Copenhagen Suborbitals style – and also the development of a hybrid rocket cluster sufficient to act as a TLI stage for a CubeSat-derived lunar probe.  I suspect we could fit a 3U CubeSat and enough OHKLA-derived rockets in a Falcon 1e that we can do a lunar crasher probe mission, like Luna 1.  This is the quickest and cheapest way we are going to do anything on the lunar-front.  It also helps to give the CubeSat project and the hybrid rocketry projects some long term value – they are means to greater ends, showing we have some long term goals, but the projects themselves are still about as simple as one can possibly start with.
5. We should, pardon my French, get fucking incorporated.  There is nothing but laziness holding us back on this front and this has been true for a long time.  Someone in the US get us a PO Box so we can complete the forms and do this.  Rocket has enough money from our fundraising drive to cover the PO Box, so this will cost you nothing but some time.  There are no technical skills required, anybody who is literate can do it.  The main motivation for this is:
6. We should be trying to raise funds, because without funds even the simple projects like weather balloons won't work.  All of our projects should be able to make us money in some small way.  With the balloon project, we can sell space adverts, as linked above.  With OHKLA we can charge people to put personal trinkets in the nosecone so they can brag that their watch has been into space (or whatever – it sounds dumb but people will pay for this so we should do it).

I am open to feedback on these things, but unless the feedback comes quickly and is sufficiently convincing (i.e. not just "I don't like this", but a reasoned argument for why these new projects will not work – in the case of the weatherballoon project despite the fact that countless small and cheap groups have done it before us) I will begin gradually making these changes unilaterally.  If it takes you a week to voice your objections to something like this then, to be blunt, that's too slow and I don't care anymore.  If we need to build in a one week delay between replies in negotiating a direction for CSTART then it will take us 6 months to get to the point where everybody is happy, in which time "everybody" will be a different group of people.

joe.haydu said:

I think the key here is that the new projects should be stepping stones to more complex projects. Have a few different projects designed to provide some proof of concept results won't make us look bad, it will make us look better and allow us to progress more quickly on future projects.

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I also agree with this.  No project should not have any kind of future further down the track – everything should lead to something grander.  OHKLA should lead to things like our manned suborbital rocket and to a TLI stage for minimalist lunar probes.  CubeSats should start simple and evolve into things like the aforementioned probes, or genuinely scientifically valuable LEO projects.  I think the proposed list of projects here has this property.  The balloon project is there to provide support for OHKLA and the CubeSat project, both of which have down-the-road extensions.

joe.haydu said:

What kind of payload are we looking at? I'm all for a CubeSat, but I'd like to see it contribute to future projects. If we have a long range plan, the CubeSat would be an ideal test platform for a whole host of sub systems.

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This is a fair question.  I imagine the first CubeSat will largely be a "Hello, World!" kind of a thing to validate our ability to engineer these sorts of projects in an open and collaborative manner, but if we're going to pay to launch it we may as well make it as useful as possible for future directions.  There are lots of useful things one can do in LEO with CubeSats, maybe we should research these things and make a list of favourites.  I think if it's at all possible we should put an Earth-facing camera on it, merely because having photos from it will be really good publicity for us.  I also, obviously, quite like the idea of taking a CubeSat and just beefing up the power supply and antenna size and using it as a really cheap lunar probe.  I imagine all we would need for this is a bunch of sensors and some logic for encoding their readings into telemetry packets to radio back to Earth.

joe.haydu said:

I can help with this. I live near a post office, and I don't mind getting it set up.

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I really appreciate this offer from such a new member of the group.  If none of the more established members step up to the plate and if you stick around a bit and do good work, you taking care of this would be no problem.  I hope you take no offence to this, I don't mean in any way to imply you are untrustworthy, it's just that long-term guaranteed access to stuff that may show up in that PO Box will be kind of vital to the organisation, so we need to be sure that whoever ensures said-access is around for the long haul.

Post edited 9:03 am – June 29, 2010 by Luke Maurits

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A clearer view of the vision outlined above, for those interested.

These are the projects which we would work on immediately:

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High Altitude Balloon Project

 

Goal: to develop a versatile and reliable high altitude balloon payload-lift system to provide developmental and operational support to other CSTART projects. The system should be able to lift a good variety of size and mass payloads to high altitude with a robust system for real-time flight tracking and post-landing recovery. Payloads should be subject to as little dynamic load during descent/landing as possible.

CubeSat Project

Goal: to develop a family of CubeSats, of increasing complexity and capability, which share as much basic infrastructure (power, comms, etc) between models as possible, to perform scientifically interesting tasks in LEO (there's a good list of ideas on the Wikipedia CubeSat page).

Hybrid Rocketry Project

Goal: to develop a family of hybrid rockets of increasing usefulness:

• Stage 1: Minimalist Suborbital – carry 5 kg of payload (in addition to all onboard systems) above 100 km (this stage is what OHKLA currently is).
• Stage 2: "Useful" Suborbital – carry larger payloads on higher suborbital trajectories, possibly with control of the trajectory, i.e. control of time in weightlessness – this could be a revenue raiser by selling scientific payload space.
• Stage 3: Manned Suborbital – carry a < 1000 kg single-person minimalist spacecraft above 100 km (an Ansari X-Prize capable rocket). This is to support Simple Manned Spaceflight Project below.
• Stage 4: Minimalist Oribtal – put a 1U, 2U or 3U Cubesat into orbit.
• Stages >5: Useful Orbital – something on the scale of Falcon 1? Higher? OTRAG-style cluster?

Simple Manned Spaceflight Project

Goal: to develop a simple, modular manned spacecraft (using the Soyuz/Shenzhou system of a small, bare-bones reentry module and a larger orbital module) capable of supporting a range of flight profiles, from suborbital to circumlunar:

• Stage 1: Suborbital – carry a single "Command Module" above 100 km. Could generate revenue in the form of space tourism.
• Stage 2: Minimalist orbital – put the same CM from Stage 1 into LEO.
• Stage 3: "Useful" orbital – put a coupled CM-OM spacecraft into LEO. Could conceivably dock with ISS.
• Stage 4: Circumlunar – put a CM coupled with a "lunar-grade" OM on a free-return trajectory using a TLI stage.

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And these are projects further down the line we would derive from the above project's technology and experience:

 

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Lunar Probe Project

 

Goal: to send minimalist lunar probe spacecraft, derived from the results of the CubeSat Project above, to the moon, using a TLI stage derived from the results of the Hybrid Rocketry Project above.

• Stage 1: Lunar "crasher", analgous to Soviet Luna 1
• Stage 2: Soft landing – perhaps the same probe as stage 1 with an airbag-based landing system, like some Mars probes?
• Stage 3: Rovers?

Manned Lunar Exploration Project

Goal: To use the results of the Simple Manned Spaceflight Project

above, and extensions of those results, to begin manned exploration

and, eventually, settlment of the moon.

• Stage 1: Simple flag-planting

  mission (this stage is what CLLARE currently is)

• Stage 2: Longer duration utilising a minimalist

  inflatable habitat and dropped supplies.

• Stage 3: Construction of a

  small but permanent habitat supporting multiple-person crews.

• Stages

  >3: Gradual lead up to full-blown colonisation

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This collection of projects has the properties that:

 

1. No project is
   without some greater purpose. Everything is either there to support

   concurrent projects or to feed into future projects. Compare this to

   the current situation where OHKLA exists more or less in a vacuum with

   no real purpose – it's a vestige of our original, over-ambitious CLLARE

   plans. The progression of all projects in this collection is pointed in

   more or less the same direction: exploration of the moon, both unmanned

   and manned. I feel like this is a sensible long-range goal for us.

   There's a tonne of interesting stuff to be done on the moon, and it's

   by far the easiest destination outside of LEO for a small and simple

   team like ours to shoot for.

2. No probject can reasonably be called
   over-ambitious. In each of the projects the first stage is as simple as

   it reasonably can be for that project. Compare this to our current

   situation where CLLARE is, or at least is perceived to be, a single

   giant leap.

I think this is the first time we've had a proposed suite of projects

which has both of the above criteria and has a coherent overall

direction, which feels like a good situation to be in.  The cost to getting into this state of affairs is to introduce two new projects, one of which (the balloon project) is frankly trivial compared to everything else, the other of which we almost started recently anyway.

EDIT: Argh!  Formatting on this forum is a joke!  Ignore completely spurious <br/> tags which are consistently conjured from the ether.

J. Simmons said:

Would you be interested in some outside help on this? We have been wanting to launch a web-based engineering project management tool at Mach 30 for some time now. We are light on coders (which is part of the reason that we have not gotten something yet) but have a couple of systems engineers who have been discussing and documenting requirements and use cases and some budding partnerships with another open design/hardware group that has real hardware they have developed and are interested in giving feedback about such a system. We may even be able to get some web hosting space from said partner if that would be useful.
Let me know what you think.

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This could actually be very helpful indeed!  It sounds like we are sort of in opposite situations – I have a moderate amount of web app building experience (using the Symfony framework), but very little background in things like systems engineering or project management.  Perhaps between our two groups we can turn out something truly useful?  At any rate I am interested in hearing more about what you had in mind, so feel free to either email me or, probably better, start a thread in our forums and we (as in the entire CSTART community, or the interested subset) can discuss it further.

J. Simmons said:

Great!  Let's here it for collaboration.  :)  It is getting late here tonight, but I have a note on my todo list to post some material to the forums tomorrow.

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I look forward to reading it!

rpulkrabek said:

Luke, I really like how you proposed the multi-phase projects. I think it's logical and the intentions are clear. There are quite many things that could be worked on, and hopefully we can get quite many groups to focus on them. For me, now, I think it's best that I continue my focus with OHKLA.

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I'm glad you think so!  I feel like it is a nice and clear structure which looks better than what we currently have.