Linux Rocket Blasts Off This Fall

Posted by timothy on Monday June 9, 2003 @04:56PM 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!"

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IN SOVIET RUSSIA! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-09 16:59 · Score: -1, Offtopic

All good cosmonauts get first post!!!
Not so fast by Tablizer · 2003-06-09 17:00 · Score: 0, Offtopic

SCO will probably try to knock it out of the sky with an anti-rocket missle, using a MS-built engine.

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Table-ized A.I.
hybrid jokes... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-09 17:02 · Score: -1, Offtopic

1. In Soviet Russia, SCO joke posts you!
2. ???
3. Profit!
Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-09 17:08 · Score: -1, Offtopic

you've got a space in your sig.
Continued by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-09 17:15 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Bush: Ah good. Time. I need some more of that. Recently I haven't found much time to pick my nose on camera, accidentally swear at journalists on live microphones, invent new rules of english grammar/pronunciation, and repeatedly demonstrate my ignorance of foreign cultures and the names of foreign heads of state. Seems like this "terra-ism" thing has gotten everyone to forget about all that.