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NASA Needs Prize Contest Ideas
Michael Huang writes "If you like the idea of tech contests--think ANSARI X PRIZE and DARPA Grand Challenge--and you also like space, then NASA wants you. It needs ideas (and rules) for the Centennial Challenges, prize contests with $20 million funding in 2005. Current ideas (download Excel spreadsheet) include: Mars and asteroid microspacecraft missions, lunar robotic landing, robotic triathalon, rover survivor, Antarctic rover traverse and extreme environment computer. Wikipedia has good coverage."
Just kidding folks. Now just settle down.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award
I hereby, and until notice to the contrary, endow the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award. This prize will consist of 3 ounces of gold or the monetary equivalent going to the next amateur team launching a vehicle to a height in excess of 200 kilometers, which in my opinion qualifies as an open source entry. These funds will be disbursed at my sole discretion.
For a an entry to qualify as "Open Source", for purposes of this prize, the team launching a rocket must make available sufficient information in machine readable form via the web to create and launch a rocket the same as the entry which travelled to 200 kilometers. The entry description should also include a description of safety procedures used to launch the rocket in question. The entry description considered must be public domain or available under a license that qualifies as Open Source according to the Open Source Consortium. The manufacture of the rocketry entry should be accomplished by tools and materials that are readily available to the general public from multiple sources or are themselves Open Source.
My primary intent here is to create an award that encourages free distribution of detailed rocketry designs that can be refined by a number of individuals similar to the way Linux kernel development has harness the energies of a large team throughout the world. It is not my intent to encourage entrants to relinquish their rights to patent protection by publishing their inventions (though the act of publishing may have legal ramifications). Candidates for the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award may be relinquishing substantial rights to maintain intellectual property via trade secrets (and may be relinquishing foreign patent rights if they haven't filed by the date they publish on the web). Entry descriptions may be "dual licensed" (i.e. the entry description may be available on the web via the GPL, but the entrant might still charge corporations for whom the GPL is not an acceptable license a fee to get this same material under some other license which might not be an Open Source license). I will be loose in my interpretation of what "Open Source" means for purposes of this prize (though I may endow a future prize with a tighter definition).
There are real difficulties in applying the Open Source model to amateur rocketry. I would expect that entries to this contest might be using rather different sets of tools and materials--many of which will have proprietary components. It is my hope here to provide some basic designs that will be ready when techniques like those described in Marshall Burns's "Automated Fabrication" or Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems", make creation of small runs of complex machines relatively inexpensive. Still, gcc didn't need the linux kernel and BSD kernels to be ready and useful. Nor did linux need availability of an Open Source design for a microprocesser to be manufactured in quantity to be useful. I expect that over time, we'll see standards emerge for Open Source rocketry designs. I intend to revise this award description to reflect these standards as they emerge (for example, I can imagine that we might eventually want to specify that some specific Open Source tool describe the design and assembly of a rocket when we can assume that the lion's share of rocketry amateurs have access to tools compliant with specific standards). I will give folks advance warning of any such changes so that this minimally affects work that is in progress.
Background
My real goal in supporting space development is recreating the pos
Seastead this.