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Linux Rocket Blasts Off This Fall
HardcoreGamer writes "An Oregon amateur rocket group, the Portland State Aerospace Society, plans to launch a Linux-powered rocket weighing 12 pounds to 55,000 feet at a speed of Mach 3 in September, Wired News reports. The rocket's onboard computer is an AMD 586 processor and a Jumptec MOPS/520 PC/104+ board along with a power supply, a PCMCIA card carrier for an 802.11b card to transmit data to the ground, and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage. The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux, with the 2.4.20 Linux kernel. The group will present a paper (HTML | PDF ) on the use of free software in rocketry at Usenix 2003. The real question is whether their network card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!"
I guess this redefines the term "crash."
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
Do you really want to have to pay royalties to SCO on your rocket? There are high-quality commercial embedded OS's without much clearly defined IP rights, and no such liability issues, and I think its a good idea to go with the Gartner recommendation and avoid the potential legal issues with Linux for the time being.
and of course this will just encourage those rascally terrorist who want to build nasty rocketses and blow us all to smithereens. Since now they won't have to pay those pesky licence fees for operating systems for their WMDs.
I think the real question is will the pringles can survive 15 g's for 10 seconds?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
"...MS-built engine"
It'll never get off the ground - too much bloat!
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Bush: linux can be use to launch rocket? The very thing that terrorist lacks? It's free and distributed widely on the Internet? We got a problem here Ashcroft: not only that, but its source code is not encrypted, anyone could store a copy in their compueter. Bush: Then I'm assuming that even if we EMP all the computers, the source might still be stored somewhere as a printed copy? Ashcroft: I'm afraid so. I always have a problem tainting uses of technology Bush: then let's ban printers as well, that will buy you sometime.
kernel_panic() : This is a one way trip ! Aaaaaaa !
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
...that my design documents aren't the only ones that look like this.
MS are great. Linux is crap.
Now simply ride the flames that come out the back of that.....
Aim for Redmond, guys.
Bowie J. Poag
Cringely got something like 10Km with a Pringles can, so I expect someone with more of a clue can push that to 55,000'.
;) Thats how I read it the first time anyways...
I'm sorry, but whats a clue can and why is it better than pringles?
Aww c'mon, they've only Linux. Not as if installing Linux is rocket-science...
More than mere navel gazing.
During system installation, it's important to use the right networking packages, to cope with the slightly nonstandard hardware. At the bash prompt, type:
% apt-get skynet
You should have seen what I did to my network card after it stopped working! Amazingly, after an approximate 20G throw against the wall, it started working again!
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
First of all, the techs will spend 3 weeks just trying to install Linux. There won't be a single driver that's compatible, and the few that exist will be buggy. Each different tech will want a different version, one wants NASA-Linux, another wants Goddard-Linux, and they all will be uninstalling the previous install and secretly putting their own distibution on it. If they ever settle on one install, then they will discover there's no applications to run, except Windows versions. Finally they'll get fed up with it and just put OSX on.
What would RIAA do if a satellite full of mp3s was launched with easy access for everybody?
Easy, sue SCO, the owner of the patents for Linux for developing a platform that allowed such a satellite to be launched.
"This is certainly a brave approach that throws everything we thought we knew about building a rocket" said NASA Ames' deputy director for research, G. Allen Flynt. "It shows that we've being doing it all wrong for years, trying to build ever more powerful, more efficient rocket motors, when the real solution was staring us in the face; Replace the expensive rocket motor with a cheap commodity PC running GNU/Linux. Brilliant. My hat goes off to these guys"
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
NEWS JUST IN---->The RIAA has sued the makers of said rocket, as the 802.11b link could "techinically be used to share illegal files accross the network".
Finally, somebody gets an AMD to run at a high speed.