OpenLuna ask about open source CAD software on Slashdot: apparently largely ignored/mocked | Other | Forum

Paul Graham from OpenLuna has Asked Slashdot for advice on open source CAD software they could use – very much like the investigations into this we did early after our founding.

I am really, really disappointed to see the Slashdot community's response (I used to be a Slashdot addict before Reddit came along).  Poor Paul has fared little better at Slashdot than we did at the Welder's Web forums.  Most people are extremely pesimistic and dismissive of the entire concept of private trips to the moon.  I would expect this from the masses, but not from one of the best-established geek communities on the web.

Why does everyone act like this is so damned hard?  Admittedly it is no walk in the park but it's not physically impossible to do it without a billion dollars and a thousand PhD engineers either.  Commercial man-rated flights to LEO are about to become quite cheap.  Lunar trajectory simulations can be done on a modern computer by a single person who knows some high school physics and a little bit about numerical solution of DEs.  Any problems related to electronics and software can be easily squashed by the mighty power of distributed development over the internet.  The life support requirements are in the same difficulty ballpark as a submarine, which private companies build as a matter of routine.  And, of course, it has been done before and all the manuals are easy to find on the web.

Something really, really has to be done to dispell this idea that spaceflight is impossibly complex for anyone smaller than NASA (assuming this is the case – maybe I'm deluding myself by thinking that I have any idea how hard it really is).  Based on everything I've read about manned spaceflight by the US and USSR in the 60s (and since CSTART began, that's quite a lot), I honestly think that, in 2010, a well chosen team of 25 people or less, with a few high end computers and an internet connection, could comfortably complete all the design work for a minimalist lunar landing.  Hell, 5 of us with limited experience have sketched out a feasible plan based on established ideas in 3 months.  If we had a dedicated team of 10 specialists (people with degrees in all the right kinds of engineering) we could bring to bear on fleshing it out, in a year we'd have something looking pretty damn solid.  Things have changed since the 1960s.  CFD essentially didn't exist then – today, SpaceShipOne worked fine and they did no windtunnel testing of it, the aeroshell design was done purely by CFD.

I suppose we'll just have to blow raspberries at them all from the lunar surface.

brmj said:

We should probably email Paul with the details on that CAD software we found. I can't for the life of me remeber what it was called, or I'd look it up and do it myself.

Do you mean BRL-CAD?  It's been mentioned at /. already more than once, so I dare so he is aware of it.  The /. community's opinion of it seems to be that it is competitive with commercial solutions with regards to the actual features it has, but it lags well behind in learnability/usability – the sterotypical FOSS situation, really.

Re: the SpaceUp money – I'll try to do a blog post about this tomorrow and mention it in all the usual places to increase awareness/interest.  We won't have much chance of getting the cash together without doing this, I think.

brmj said:

I'm thinking about doing a matching donation sort of thing to encourage people. Think this is sensable, or should I just donate whatever I decide I can afford to and get it over with?

This is sensible in that it will encourage people to donate more than you simply donating your maximum amount from the get go will.  The only complication is that if you have to stop matching donations too early on because you've exceeded what you can afford it will look bad.  If you choose your matching scheme carefully enough (e.g. you will match each donation up to $x) you should be able to avoid this hapenning too soon.

I would like to think that our website does not look scammy, but I may be a bad judge of these things – someone on /. said that Copenhagen Suborbitals had a terrible, scammy looking website too, but I think their website is just fine.

I do feel like we could make the frontpage of cstart.org carry a lot more impact and important basic information about CSTART, but I don't think I can make any real suggestions for how to achieve this yet, I'm not particularly great at web design.  I'll try to think about this, though.  If we are going to make big, awesome changes to the website, it would be good to have it done before SpaceUp.