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Linux Rocket Blasts Off This Fall

Posted by timothy on from the fwooooooof dept.

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!"

7 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Re:802.11b? by ktakki · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was wondering about that, too. But the site states that they're allowed to boost the power legally if it's operated by a licensed Ham radio operator (under FCC Part 97 rules).

    Cringely got something like 10Km with a Pringles can, so I expect someone with more of a clue can push that to 55,000'.

    k.

    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  2. Re:802.11b? by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/s tory/0,10801,75830,00.html

    Someone's done a 72-mile link.

    The hard part is that you either have to track the rocket with a directional antenna, or try to make everything work with a non-directional antenna. The 72-mile link was from one fixed point to another using mid-size parabolic antennas.

  3. Re:IANARS but... by AllenChristopher · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the longest time the software was written by hand from the metal up. You can't afford to have one bug in space code. It could cost half a billion dollars. Every routine was coded three different ways, and three systems ran separately. If they ever disagreed you knew you had a problem. So while you have an OS of sorts, it's the Shuttle OS, and nothing else. After all, there are a thousand assumptions that OS developers make that a space programmer has to choose him or herself. In Linux, the coder is always saying "this amount of precision is ok," but for a rocket the amount of precision needed is very well known, and incredibly demanding at all levels. For a hobbyist group, linux is one thing, but if you want to put something in geosynchronous orbit indefinitely...

  4. Re:802.11b? by HardcoreGamer · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's an explanation of how they intend to achieve this on the site, along with a link to a news release that cites the Swedish Space Corporation's success transmitting data over 310 kilometers using 802.11b.

  5. Carmack et. al. @ ArmadilloAerospace .... by malakai · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... have been doing this for awhile. The PC104 stack in their VTVL rockets/crafts have always been linux kernels.

    He's also been using 802.11 for communications.

    His laptop control station is win32 though.

    ArmadilloAerospace

    -malakai

    --
    -Malakai
    A Dragon Lives in my Garage
    1. Re:Carmack et. al. @ ArmadilloAerospace .... by tramm · · Score: 3, Informative
      ... have been doing this for awhile. The PC104 stack in their VTVL rockets/crafts have always been linux kernels.
      As have we at autopilot.sourceforge.net. We're not building rockets, but autonomous rotorcraft.
      He's also been using 802.11 for communications.
      Same here. Our early helicopters used CF 802.11 cards, but the cheap patch antennas could not handle the vibration. We're now using a D-Link ethernet bridge with 100baseT for the onboard network.
      His laptop control station is win32 though.
      We're not! Although the network layer and gui are all portable and do run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Win32.

      The hardware is for sale from Rotomotion, too, so you can build your own.

      --
      -- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
  6. Re:I realize you are joking... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.space-rockets.com/congress