Subscribe to rss feed

Project restructuring | Project Proposals | Forum

 
You must be logged in to post user permissions login Login register Register


Register? | Lost Your Password?

Search Forums:


searchicon 






Minimum search word length is 3 characters – Maximum search word length is 84 characters
Wildcard Usage:
*  matches any number of characters    %  matches exactly one character

topic

Project restructuring

print
small tagNo Tags
UserPost

2:30 am
April 26, 2010


Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

Admin

posts 1483

offline
link
print
1
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

I'm somewhat abusing this forum, in that I'm not proposing anything entirely new, project wise, but this seems like the best place to put it.  This post is mainly aimed at the CSTART directors for when they get back from their various real life obligations, but feedback from the wealth of newcomers is welcome, since my proposed resructuring here is in response to their influx.

First suggestion: more and more of the newcomers are expressing concern at the ambitious nature of CLLARE.  Of course, long time CSTARTers will know that the plan has never been to jump into CLLARE, it's supposed to be a long term project with simpler projects happening first to test things out.  But obviously this fact is not made clear anywhere on the website, and even if it were, people have expressed concern about the lack of a clear "road map" leading from simpler projects to CLLARE.  So how about we define a separate project which is roughly on par with Vostok / Mercury, i.e. the construction a minimalist one-person orbital spacecraft which is to be as extensible via the addition of modules as possible, and define CLLARE to be a later project to build a moon mission using the hardware from this earlier project.  This may seem redundant to those who know CLLARE well and understand that orbital standalone flights were always part of the picture, but the advantage of project separation is that (i) it makes this clear and (ii) the simpler Vostok-esque project will not need a Proposal Phase like CLLARE (because there is essentially no flexibility in overall mission architecture), which will let us get to work on that project sooner (and for what it's worth, I have been doing a tonne of reading lately and have lots of really solid, technical work that I want to see done soon, and 90% of this would apply to this lesser Vostok-esque project).  Thoughts?  If we did do this I would be happy to downgrade the extent to which CLLARE is "active", e.g. making it a Yellow Project with the Vostok Project being Green, using our discussed colour code system.

Second suggestion: I feel like we really need another simple and tractable project alongside OHKLA which focuses more on electronicsy stuff.  OHKLA is an excellent and tractable introduction to rocketry, but it has fairly limited scope with regards to things like navigation and communication, and what scope it does have for those things comes with the advantage of knowing that nothing is actually going to fly for a while since we'll be working on the unrelated rocketry stuff.  The previously proposed high altitude balloon project seems like a no-brainer for this.  It is simple, it is cheap, it is an obvious precursor to things like CubeSats.

As always, I know we are afraid of overexterting ourselves project wise, etc., but I feel like there is a mild sense of urgency around restructuring at the moment because we have a lot of interested new people around, they are making it clear that they want to see more simple projects, and we don't want to waste this opportunity by losing those people.  The restructuring proposed here is intended to cater to these new people by increasing the number of simpler and tractable seeming projects and also providing a clearer road-map going forward which is something the newcomers want.

CSTART directors, can you please weigh in on this ASAP?

If we are comfortable doing a restructure this "dramatic" I would even consider pushing for a more organised project system which acknowledged 3 separate "branches" of project, such as Rocketry (with the OHKLA project acting as the "root" of this project subtree), Unmanned Spaceflight (with the Balloon Project acting as the "root" and leading to things like CubeSats, "real satellites", luanr probes, etc) and Manned Spaceflight (with the Vostok Project acting as the "root" and leading to CLLARE and further).  This provides a very clear roadmap and shows people that we are not interested in taking great leaps from the get go.  When all branches are at their root status, we have 3 active projects, which is only 1 more than current, and equal to the number we were going to have when the Reddit CubeSat Project adoption effort seemed likely.

Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

5:12 pm
April 26, 2010


antinode

Member

posts 64

offline
link
print
2
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

Post edited 5:37 pm – April 26, 2010 by antinode


The problem is even though you might say there will be multiple missions before CLLARE, this is not reflected at all by the site copy or where efforts are being directed. The first answer in the FAQ says "The group’s first and current goal is a successful manned mission to the moon, the Collaborative Lunar Landing and Research Expedition (CLLARE).  See our about page for more details."/p>

Luke Maurits said:

Project proposals should not represent huge leaps in scope or ambition beyond existing projects.  We need to prove that an open source, collaborative space agency can successfully walk before trying to make it run, and that it can run before trying to make it fly (don't take this literally, of course, we'll be literally flying from the start).

These are your own words from the sticky for this forum. This organization and has absolutely no experience, and this model of developing such complicated hardware over the Internet isn't exactly common and proven. CLLARE is doing something only one very well resourced organization has ever done before. It is very much a "huge leap in scope or ambition" since the current scope is zero. It's great as a concept at this point, but only that. I'd even say CLLARE violates the Design Philosophy by not keeping things simple.

A tiered roadmap is definitely a good idea. Scaled Composites for instance has a very simple 3 tier system. Tier 1 is sub-orbital, Tier 2 is orbital, and Tier 3 is the moon and beyond. Following this model, ALL efforts should be focused on Tier 1. Placing a majority of our efforts on Tier 3 already is flying before we can even walk.

EDIT: This isn't so much directed at Luke as it is the other directors. Luke pretty much covered all this is his post, I just wanted to give another point of view.

5:33 pm
April 26, 2010


antinode

Member

posts 64

offline
link
print
3
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

Post edited 5:36 pm – April 26, 2010 by antinode


double post

7:34 pm
April 26, 2010


Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

Admin

posts 1483

offline
link
print
4
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

Antinode, what did you think specifically about the proposal of setting up an official balloon project and freezing CLLARE to make room for a Vostok-esque project?  This would give us 3 projects in total, two of them in Tier 1 and one of them in Tier 2.  It doesn't strictly follow your "everything in Tier 1" philosophy, but I would argue that we are different from SC in that we are not actually launching stuff ourself.  For SC, Tier 2 means flying stuff into orbit.  For us, at least for now, it means building something on Earth and paying somebody who knows better, like SpaceX, to fly it to orbit, so I do not think it represents quite such a stretch.  Obviously as much of the tech for the Vostok project as possible would be tested in the balloon project first, and the first actual flights of the craft would be unmanned, and we could make this very clear in the site copy?

Also, I have to very strongly reject the idea that CLLARE violates the Design Philosophy.  The Design Philosophy is supposed to constrain the way we solve the tasks we set ourselves, not the tasks themselves.  Interpeting it as saying that we can only attempt simple projects is absurd: it means we'll never leave LEO, never do manned spaceflight, etc, etc.

Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

9:23 pm
April 26, 2010


antinode

Member

posts 64

offline
link
print
5
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

I do agree that an orbital program as the stage prior to attempting for the Moon, though I would still prefer to see a majority of efforts at this time be placed on sub-orbital missions. This is not a hard sub-orbital only, as the CubeSat project is quite a bit simpler than OHKLA, even though they'd be in orbit. I was simply giving SC's use of a tiered system to reach their goals as an example, not that we adopt their tiers. What besides satellites would have the launch outsourced?

If I were to pick active projects it would be full programs for CubeSats and OHKLA, with balloons used to test different technologies that they'd use. Cheapest and easiest first, and expanding the envelope with each successive program. That's what I meant when I said CLLARE violates the Design Philosophy (I was stretching, I know). CLLARE is very complicated, and we should start simple and work our way up. After a successful OHKLA program, the orbital program is the next logical step. First unmanned, then manned. After that, the moon. After that…. who knows.

10:50 pm
April 26, 2010


rpulkrabek

Member

posts 348

offline
link
print
6
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

I don't want to voice my opinion on CLLARE, since I am not so active with that project. As for OHKLA, I feel it's a safe and wise choice to include electronics projects. I would like to try and continue working hard with OHKLA. I feel we have a strong core group that can contribute well to the project. I see good things coming from this and within a relatively short period of time. Also, the balloon projects is a great way to get people interested, since quick results will occur.

9:31 am
April 27, 2010


Rizwan

Admin

posts 170

offline
link
print
7
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

I guess we should have been more clear with the roadmap, it was pretty obvious to us that there would be test missions, but not to others.

I wouldn't want to freeze the CLLARE project per se, but we could create sub-phases for it with any one phase being active at any given moment, so that way every body works on the same phase and at the same time the core project moves forward as well.

May be we could create a wiki page called "Project Restructuring" and let people edit it, adding and dividing projects into different phases and sub-groups. That way we will have a clear road map about what the community wants.

12:23 pm
April 27, 2010


Julius

Member

posts 12

offline
link
print
8
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

I just want to say I agree with the need for a roadmap.

There has to be some guidelines on how to form the roadmap.

For instance complexity might be a guiding factor. Or money, or needed manpower, or something else. Or some combination that makes sense.

You probably need to first be clear about what guides the choices in forming the roadmap, before setting milestones by what feels good.

You might end up with the same type of roadmap in the end, but it would be more grounded on some facts and choices are made on purpose. If it happens to be a bad roadmap for some reason, you can then change it and have some sense of why you are changing it, and in what direction you'd like to change it to.

 

5:00 pm
April 27, 2010


Rocket-To-The-Moon

Altus, Oklahoma, USA

Member

posts 685

offline
link
print
9
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

Post edited 5:23 pm – April 27, 2010 by Rocket-To-The-Moon


My personal opinion is that OHKLA should be our focus until we succeed. CLLARE is the end goal and that has not changed.

Using knowledge and experience from friends like Copenhagen Suborbitals OHKLA shouldn't be too difficult (and I use difficult as a relative term here). Building our own Heat 1X would technically satisfy the requirements of OHKLA. We could also build our own hardware/software flight package to gain valuable knowledge with those issues. 

If we had a warehouse where all of our 114 members could meet in person on nights and weekends then I would say to go ahead with CLLARE now, but until then I don't think we will be able to progress very much on that front.

 

Edit to clarify: I am not shooting down our online collaboration by saying that physical meeting is the only way to go forward. If we have 10 physical teams spread all across the globe then I absolutely believe that this online infrastructure that we have built is absolutely essential. But it will  take physical teams to bring concepts to reality. Maybe we should start a push for members to create local chapters.

Main Workgroups: Propulsion & Spacecraft Engineering

5:24 pm
April 27, 2010


antinode

Member

posts 64

offline
link
print
10
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

I think it's important to view this from the standpoint that each mission is capable of standing alone on its own, and that they're not just "test missions" for CLLARE. CLLARE may at the end of the current roadmap but it is not this organizations only reason for existing. These missions may test certainly technologies that will be used on CLLARE, but that is not their only reason for existing. I only say this because I've seen more than one director acting like CLLARE is what really matters and everything else is only a test mission for CLLARE. They should really be viewed as missions of increasing difficultly that bring increased knowledge and respect to CSTART as a whole. This distinction is small, but important in my opinion.

7:02 pm
April 27, 2010


Rocket-To-The-Moon

Altus, Oklahoma, USA

Member

posts 685

offline
link
print
11
0
ratedowngrey
rateupgrey

antinode said:

They should really be viewed as missions of increasing difficultly that bring increased knowledge and respect to CSTART as a whole. This distinction is small, but important in my opinion.


 

I think that this is the underlying philosophy of everything. It would be a waste of time and resources to have side projects that contribute nothing. OHKLA is sort of in strange place in the organization because it was born of the need to experiment with hybrid rockets (at one point we wanted to develop our own booster, OHKLA would be a stepping stone for that). Now OHKLA is more of a project to prove that we can work together as a team and do something truly amazing. I do not think that this objective is at all trivial. OHKLA will provide a solid social framework for us to work with so that we can tackle more challenging problems.

Main Workgroups: Propulsion & Spacecraft Engineering

small tagNo Tags

About the CSTART – Collaborative Space Travel and Research Team Forum

Forum Timezone: UTC -6

Most Users Ever Online: 59

Currently Online:
5 Guests

Currently Browsing this Topic:
1 Guest

Forum Stats:

Groups: 4
Forums: 36
Topics: 513
Posts: 3808

Membership:

There are 362 Members

There are 2 Admins

Top Posters:

Rocket-To-The-Moon – 685
brmj – 402
rpulkrabek – 348
DenisG – 69
antinode – 64
J. Simmons – 46

Recent New Members: kelley, Robinn, kasperholly, sharonn, alexander007, shekhar

Administrators: Luke Maurits (1483 Posts), Rizwan (170 Posts)



 
share save 120 16