Post edited 7:06 pm – April 12, 2010 by Luke Maurits
natronics said:
I didn't mean to sound too pessimistic — in general collaboration is a
good idea. I'm just trying to stay realistic. For the record this is not
the first time that a similar collaboration has been proposed by
outside groups but in the past it hasn't worked out. As it stands right
now I don't think we have the bandwidth to work on more than one
project. That can change though! We are restructuring our funding at the
moment and depending on what we come up with, and how many students and
other people we can gather up there might be some opportunity to work
on side projects.
Sure thing – there's nothing wrong with staying realistic! It's good to know these things up front so we can plan for something which is likely to work
natronics said:
This is a great place to start actually, we can both try to propose
ideas and the revise them until we have something that we all can agree
on.
This sounds great, I will draw this to everybody's attention so hopefully we can get more input on coming to a mutually beneficial arrangement.
natronics said:
The first 3 bullet points seem reasonable, of course we would both take
credit as far as logos and such and if you want we can work with your
collaboration tools, in fact you may very well be better set up because
you have forums and some better looking web infrastructure, though
instead of mercurial we all are ardent uses of git :)
Haha! We went with Mercurial over git purely because it was the only distributed option at Google Code. :)
natronics said:
I would argue that we are not really 'better' set up to manufacture
anything. Everything we build is a hack. A good hack, mind you, but a
hack still. Most of the work is done out of members garages. We don't
even have any kind of unified (hardware) workspace.
Fair enough, this is good to know, it will let us plan our collaboration better. For what its worth, you guys are still leagues ahead of us when it comes to hardware!
natronics said:
So lets step back a bit: OHKLA is a project to lift a mass to 100km.
There is no guidance and it's recovery model is simple. So what you
need is a rocket (aka a tube capped off at one end) and a motor and a
recovery system. I would highly recommend working closely with
Copenhagen Suborbitals on all the motor stuff and therefore the body of
the rocket (I assume they know more about integrating an oxidizer tank
into a structure and things like that). We can probably help the most
with recovery (including communication/GPS) and maybe building a nose
code.
Actually, one thing that had come up is that if PSAS were to be substantially involved, we may think about "upgrading" OHKLA a little bit. The original motivation for OHKLA (and particularly the motivation for it being so simple) was because we wanted to build huge, clustered hybrid launch vehicles, OTRAG style, so we wanted to learn about high peformance hybrid rockets as quickly as we could, so we basically wanted to start building a rocket and just put the bare minimum of everything else on it (e.g. guidance). Then we sobered up a bit and decided it would be better to go with the Falcon 9 for an LV (mostly to avoid ITAR hassles, but also to save years/millions), removing the immediate need for hybrid rocket experience and leaving OHKLA somewhat without justification. Talking it over we decided OHKLA was still useful as (i) a "simple" project we could achieve with some significant probability of success, and (ii) a good first step toward a more useful suborbital experiment platform. Now, with that in mind, and seeing that PSAS has a lot of interest/experience with guidance (I recall reading you hope to build the world's first actively controlled amateur rocket), it might make sense to expand OHKLA's scope a little to include some basic control or the like. This was just an idea, mind you, not something we have agreed upon yet. If PSAS would be interested in helping with active control if we went in that direction, it's a distinct possibility.
As for comms/GPS, sure, we would be absolutely happy to have you guys focus your help in that area if that is where you think you can do the best work.
natronics said:
So what do you think about something more compartmentalized, like trying
to build the rocket yourselves (or with another group) but having us
work on one piece like the recovery system? This is again assuming that
we will have the time to do so. But I think it will have a better
chance of success if we have one, smaller, well defined thing to focus
on.
I have no objections to going about things this way if you think it will increase the probability of a successful collaboration.
Thanks for your sustained interest in this! It will be fantastic if we can come to a promising agreement and see some successful collaboration between our teams in the future.
EDIT: Please forgive bad formatting. This forum software is terrible in that regard, and I can no longer be bothered hand-editing the HTML to pretty my posts up every time!
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