I'll be using this thread to report on my SpaceUp attendance, hopefully. I can't gaurentee my posts will be particularly detailed or frequent, but I'll try to post a few updates as it goes. There will, of course, probably be a more detailed report when it is over and I have some more downtime.
For my first post, I thought I'd let everyone know that leaveing for the airport within the next half an hour or so. It's really cool that this is finally happening.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
7:43 am February 26, 2010
Rocket-To-The-Moon
Altus, Oklahoma, USA
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Sounds great! Does your laptop have a webcam? Any chance you could broadcast a live stream for us?
This site lets you both broadcast live and save the recording.
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7:45 am February 26, 2010
Rizwan
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You could also use our twitter account for the same.
3:04 pm February 26, 2010
brmj
Rochester, New York, United States
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I'll look into it.
Another quick update: I have arrived in San Diego. I'm at the airport, getting directions to the hostel. More to follow when i have in excess of 5 minutes battery life.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
5:18 pm February 26, 2010
brmj
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Update: I am at the hostel. My laptop seems to have mysteriously failed between the airport and here. It fails to even show the boot splash. For now, I am using one of the hostel's public computers. I'll have to see if I can get it working again; if not, I'll load our files onto a flash drive and see if people will let me use theirs for the non-ignite presentations.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
6:33 pm February 26, 2010
Rocket-To-The-Moon
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Wow, that is horrible timing. I hope things work out!
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7:30 pm February 26, 2010
brmj
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Rocket-To-The-Moon said:Wow, that is horrible timing. I hope things work out!
Thanks. I've isolated the failure a bit, with the help of an HP support guy who was actually remarkably compotent. There's perhaps a 95% chance that it is a problem with the main board.
I'll manage. It may be inconveniant, but I'm sure there will be plenty of people willing to lend me a laptop to show them our materials. I' probably buy a new laptop once I get home, since this one was getting a bit old anyway.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
11:10 pm February 27, 2010
Rocket-To-The-Moon
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I actually had the chance to watch your presentation live online. Great job, and thank you very very much for taking the time and initative to go out there. You have finally brought us offline. I hope you made friends out there.
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11:28 pm February 27, 2010
Rocket-To-The-Moon
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A NASA Goddard employee is totally validating our method of using a Wiki to organize technical knowledge.
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11:43 pm February 27, 2010
Rocket-To-The-Moon
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It is over for the day.
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1:30 am February 28, 2010
Rizwan
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Post edited 1:45 am – February 28, 2010 by Rizwan
The CSTART Presentation at SpaceUP. That was awesome, brmj!
3:10 am February 28, 2010
brmj
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Thanks. It was a lot of fun. Words can not express how awesome today was. I've had conversations with a few big names in newspace and an old MIT AI lab hacker, gotten an inside look at how SpaceX operates and where they are headed, seen all sorts of interesting hardware, you name it. I haven't gotten any specific negative responses about our plans yet, beyond acknowledgement of ITAR and funding difficulties. Everyone I've talked to seems to think it is all technically feasible, at least in essence. Also, I found out just how much like us SpaceX started out. They were able to do really serious launch vehicle development at first with just twenty or thirty engineers and Wikipedia as a primary resource, and the SpaceX employee I talked to thought they could have streamlined that even more if they didn't spend so much time optimizing things that didn't need it. They really are the group's success story at this point. I'll have to talk to the SpaceX guys tomorrow about their possible future relationship with us.
I got to talk with some of the NASA people involved in their response to the Open Government Initiative. NASA has freed something like 70 pieces of software, it turns out, and they seem to be trying to open things up in general a little. However, it seems a little half-hearted on the scale of the agency as a whole, and they aren't looking to open source flight software any time soon, though I may be wrong. They did say that they are trying to get satellites taken out of ITAR, though, and that for the past year or so the word down the grapevine is that some sanity in ITAR is on its way. Not sure how soon that will be, though.
I may do a more in depth response a bit latter tonight. If not, expect one sometime tomorrow.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
4:25 am February 28, 2010
Luke Maurits
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brmj said:
Thanks. It was a lot of fun. Words can not express how awesome today was. I've had conversations with a few big names in newspace and an old MIT AI lab hacker, gotten an inside look at how SpaceX operates and where they are headed, seen all sorts of interesting hardware, you name it. I haven't gotten any specific negative responses about our plans yet, beyond acknowledgement of ITAR and funding difficulties. Everyone I've talked to seems to think it is all technically feasible, at least in essence. Also, I found out just how much like us SpaceX started out. They were able to do really serious launch vehicle development at first with just twenty or thirty engineers and Wikipedia as a primary resource, and the SpaceX employee I talked to thought they could have streamlined that even more if they didn't spend so much time optimizing things that didn't need it. They really are the group's success story at this point. I'll have to talk to the SpaceX guys tomorrow about their possible future relationship with us.
I got to talk with some of the NASA people involved in their response to the Open Government Initiative. NASA has freed something like 70 pieces of software, it turns out, and they seem to be trying to open things up in general a little. However, it seems a little half-hearted on the scale of the agency as a whole, and they aren't looking to open source flight software any time soon, though I may be wrong. They did say that they are trying to get satellites taken out of ITAR, though, and that for the past year or so the word down the grapevine is that some sanity in ITAR is on its way. Not sure how soon that will be, though.
I may do a more in depth response a bit latter tonight. If not, expect one sometime tomorrow.
There is a lot of really positive information in this, on several fronts. Very exciting. I'm also absolutely thrilled to hear that about SpaceX. Wikipedia as a primary resource! That's incredible and inspiring. It also makes SpaceX seem a lot more down to Earth than I had thought, which raises my hopes about some sort of possible future partnership.
Also, good work and many thanks for giving this presentation. I hope you won't take offence if I say it seemed like you were far outside your comfort zone giving this talk, so all the more appreciation is due for you having the determination and courage to go through with it for the good of the group, you did well. Hopefully this will end up being a great thing for CSTART!
Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
9:58 am February 28, 2010
brmj
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Luke Maurits said:
There is a lot of really positive information in this, on several fronts. Very exciting. I'm also absolutely thrilled to hear that about SpaceX. Wikipedia as a primary resource! That's incredible and inspiring. It also makes SpaceX seem a lot more down to Earth than I had thought, which raises my hopes about some sort of possible future partnership.
Also, good work and many thanks for giving this presentation. I hope you won't take offence if I say it seemed like you were far outside your comfort zone giving this talk, so all the more appreciation is due for you having the determination and courage to go through with it for the good of the group, you did well. Hopefully this will end up being a great thing for CSTART!
With regards to the first part, they are currently making a kind of awkward transition to being a big aerospace company. They started a bit more like us, but now they've got around 1000 employees after a big wave of hirings, and it has gotten to the point where one person can't know all there is to know about a subsystem.
Second part: I don't take offense at all; its basically true! Thanks for the kind words.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
12:25 am March 1, 2010
brmj
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Post edited 12:35 am – March 1, 2010 by brmj
Another update. Today went quite well, though perhaps not quite as much so as yesterday. I had a good talk with Jon Philips; he seemed quite supportive of what we are trying to do. There was an absolutely excellent discussion organized by Samuel Coniglio of the Space Tourism Society about the infrastructure for doing cool things in space in the future. I tried my best to get right in there in that discussion and contribute on the same level as Dave Masten, for example. Not sure to what level I succeeded. Unfortunately,they had technical problems and that session did not end up being recorded. The Spacevidcast people expressed some interest in showing video from us our our partners once we are actually doing cool stuff. The SpaceX people say that the US government made them put remote detonated explosives on their spacecraft for launch abort, including in Dragon. This strikes me as very much a bad thing. All present concurred. I received word that there may be other SpaceUps in other cities, including latter this year. Getting to some of those could be fun especially if they are within driving distance instead of flying. Not sure that's how we'll want to spend our money, though. My attempt at giving a detailed CLLARE talk failed. People basically didn't think it was worth attending, given the other stuff going on at the same time and the fact that we have nothing physical thus far. Unfortunate, but I did explain it to a bunch of people in less formal situations.
Here are several ideas and comments people mentioned for us. I'll hold off on saying what I think of them to avoid prejudicing your evaluations.
One guy suggested we don't incorporate in the US, at least until ITAR is fixed and probably not even then, to reduce regulatory issues.
Someone else says that CLLARE is a dead end in the context of manned spaceflight because it may be a good way to return to the moon on the cheap, but flag-planting is about all a one person capsule is good for, in his estimation.
Someone else suggested that we organize ourselves a bit more like Ubuntu, for example, with a community collaboratively developing everything and a company attached to it to commercialize it, putting money it makes mostly back into development to aid the community.
One guy says he thinks aerial capture is the best option for recovery, and that para-sails are borderline unworkable.
Finally, there is one here that I think deserves its own paragraph.
Someone's suggestion is that we establish a world-wide network of high-bandwidth satellite up-links, building on a heritage of amateur radio more than anything, and use that as a revenue source. The rational for this was that this is a relatively ITAR-free topic, costs are lower than things actually in space, there is much relevant open source technology already, we would bassically need it for CLLARE anyway, and there may be a substantial demand for this. A lot of communication for spaceflight, especially to the ISS, right now goes through geosynchronous satellites. That's all well and good until you want low latency communications for teleoperated experiments, robots or spacecraft. Direct links to LEO would bypass that. This will perhaps be a big thing with the future of Bigallow's space stations, since it is supposedly looking like science and industry will be their biggest market long term. A cheap way to accomplish this that we discussed would be to design an open source hardware and software stack that will work, release it, and sort of offer ground station franchises to radio hams, amateur radio astronomy guys, Project Argus SETI people and so on. if they have hardware, software and a network connection meeting our needs, they can get added to a list and their station can then be used as part of our network. If their station was used in one of our commercial contracts, they would get some fraction of the money from their station's time and we would get the rest.
More to follow, probably tomorrow. I'm just about dead tired. Thanks for making this happen, everyone.
Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
1:07 am March 1, 2010
Luke Maurits
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Thanks for another detailed report! Sounds like you're having a great time.
With regards to incorporating outside the US, my understanding is that this wouldn't help us at all if our servers are still in the US, because if that is the case we are still exporting information out of the US. That said, I'm not particularly averse to incorporating outside of the US: it sounds like the government there will be a massive thorn in our sides
The satellite up-link project sounds like a fine idea, but it also makes me feel a little bit conflicted about what direction CSTART should go in. On the one hand, we have invested a lot of effort so far in our OHKLA and CLLARE projects to date. We all know and love them and consider them exciting. On the other hand, I am starting to get the sense that we have operated not just our actual engineering but also our project management on a "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers" model, rather than giving serious thought to what is achievable at lowest cost with minimal regulatory interference, and what is most extensible and useful in the future. It seems like there are ideas, like this uplink network, or working on lunar ISRU rovers (as per NASA's new competition, or as discussed on Open Manufacturing), which are possible with less money and less government hassle, and also less inherrent danger, than our current ideas, and they are also more extensible/flexible – CLLARE really is a single-purpose project. It's disappointing to hear that it didn't generate much interest. I hope we've not hitched our organisation (which I think is turning out to be fantastic – I refer here to the Social Contract, Design Philosophy and the stuff we are currently discussing with regards to light-weight but still effective engineering and management processes) to a bad main project.
Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
5:53 am March 1, 2010
Rizwan
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I am also not averse to incorporating outside the US. But the original reasons we decided to do it in US were.
1) We had two members from US. That was a majority at that moment.
2) Most importantly, we wanted donations to be tax deductible, since most of the donations were supposed to come from there.
9:16 am March 1, 2010
Rocket-To-The-Moon
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brmj said:
Someone else says that CLLARE is a dead end in the context of manned spaceflight because it may be a good way to return to the moon on the cheap, but flag-planting is about all a one person capsule is good for, in his estimation.
Do we care? To me, a dead end that results in putting a human on another heavily body is a goal worth committing an entire lifetime to. At least we could downplay what we are doing to others when they ask us what we do. "Oh, nothing, just a dead end job."
I don't think that the lack of a follow on is anything to put the brakes on. However I firmly believe that our focus should be on OHKLA at the moment.
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6:41 pm March 1, 2010
Luke Maurits
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Rocket-To-The-Moon said: Do we care? To me, a dead end that results in putting a human on another heavily body is a goal worth committing an entire lifetime to.
This is a good point.
Luke Maurits said: CLLARE really is a single-purpose project
On second thought, perhaps this is a bit unfair:
The new generic Lander base idea makes a significant proportion of the CLLARE hardware usable for a lot of cool projects, like deploying rovers to the lunar surface.
The CM by itself is a perfectly good vehicle for suborbital space tourism (a much more exciting ride than SpaceShipTwo!)
The OSM-CM configuration could be useful as a spacestation "lifeboat". We could even add a module behind the OSM which allowed docking to the ISS by its common berthing mechanism – obviously one would need to EVA into the CM, which is inconvenient but not unworkable. Heck, we could even come up with a variant of the CM which was cylindrical, with a docking ring and airlock on the front, covered by an aerodynamic fairing during launch (like SpaceX's Dragon), so that one could directly transfer between the ISS and an OSM-CM config.
The PM is, of course, an extremely generic and versatile bit of hardware.
We could always come up with a 2-person version of the CM which still fit the rest of the hardware stack if we put the two astronauts one infront of the other, like the seating in a jet fighter, instead of side by side like in Gemini.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to have a CLLARE Applications Program (in analogy to the Apollo Applications Program) to brainstorm uses and adaptions of the CLLARE hardware which are realistic and require minimal changes? If we start thinking along these lines early, we may be able to make small changes to the standard CLLARE hardware to better facilitate these applications: it would be better to catch these now than later. To be clear, I don't mean for CLLARE Applications Program to be a separate project, like OHKLA, it would just be something on the Wiki, definitely part of the CLLARE project, with some forum threads, probably in the Mission Planning Workgroup subforms just so they have somewhere to belong. This strikes me as a sensible idea, what do people think?
Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
5:19 am March 24, 2010
Luke Maurits
Adelaide, Australia
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brmj said:
Finally, there is one here that I think deserves its own paragraph.
Someone's suggestion is that we establish a world-wide network of high-bandwidth satellite up-links, building on a heritage of amateur radio more than anything, and use that as a revenue source. The rational for this was that this is a relatively ITAR-free topic, costs are lower than things actually in space, there is much relevant open source technology already, we would bassically need it for CLLARE anyway, and there may be a substantial demand for this.
Unfortunately, I think the rationale that this is a relatively ITAR-free topic may actually dead wrong. Item (b) in category XV of the United States Munitions List is:
"Ground control stations for telemetry, tracking and control of spacecraft or satellites"
which may well cover this. In true ITAR style, this is quite vague. What does "for" those things mean? Does it mean specifically designed for, or just capable of being used for? If it means just capable of being used for, I would say this rules the satellite up-link network out entirely.
Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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