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NASA Ares Rocket Specs to Be Open Source
Bruce writes "As a step toward returning to the moon, NASA announced last week that Boeing will be the lead contractor for the Ares I rocket. Interestingly, Popular Mechanics reports that the system's specifications will be 'open-source and non-proprietary' to encourage competition on future contracts."
Yeah, use witches instead!
..we will see space-shuttles being hacked in the same way wii gets hacked: People tears it apart and use it for pretty much any neat project. "Hmm, i wonder if these thrusters could heat up my apartment, instead of the old fasion fireplace i have"
Pure awesomenes
A proven (or that will be proven) rocket design, with open specs, that's amazing.
Open source rules!
Surely the specifications will be open sourced, but does it meant the code of the software in it will be opened too? If so I'd love to see some of that hit the front page of The Daily WTF.
You just got troll'd!
CAPCOM: Good morning Persues, how are you today?
PERSUES: 5 by 5 Houston, what's the plan for today? We're only halfway to the moon.
CAPCOM: Persues, we need you to run a few 'patch' commands, we're uploading the diffs now...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
This sounds more like Open Standards, not Open Source.
Not the same as open source for software. They will make the data available only to future bidders and only when it benefits the government. You're not going to download rocket technology off of NASA's website.
Iraq billions
... the system's specifications will be 'open-source and non-proprietaryFor the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
In theory anything developed with public funds is supposed to go into the public domain. But that seems to have died even faster than the Bill of Rights.
Think Deeply.
If nano-technology reaches the point where we can program assemblers to take local materials and build structures from electronic plans, what are the implications to space travel?
Imagine, for instance, if someone could take a box of Rocketbuilders out to an island somewhere and deploy it, then sit back as the nanocites build a metal extraction plant, extracted the materials it could get from the sand/ground, built pipes into the sea to process metals that are there, etc. It'd build a gantry, then assemble a rocket from specs and finally fuel it from hydrogen and oxygen cracked from the water.
An open source rocket would be a neat, easy way to get a good start for a project to create the instructions for these assemblers. I figured the big open source project when this technology came onto the scene would be digitizing and CAM'ing the specs for, say, the Saturn V (moon rocket). Make it easy enough to grow these launchers, and folks could launch prefabbed housing and supplies no problem. Just find the right spot, maybe rent an acre of seafront property with no downrange population, and go for it.
Sure, it's fantasy at this point, but who knows? This is a shot across the bow for folks that are inevitably going to say "This is a stupid idea. What use is an open source rocket if you aren't a huge government or company with a bajillion dollars/euros/rubles to spend?".
Sure, maybe the reward isn't obvious now, but what about sometime in the near future?
For mass-produced products, which is what we'd like rockets to become, the cost of the design the parts is relatively minor. So giving away the design does give away that much. Instead, it's the design of the manufacturing systems that determines how cheap and reliably we can make the thing. Cars are cheap because they have almost no labor (most cars take less than 40 labor-hours to build). And what make a Pentium so valuable is not the design layout of the transistors, but the $1 billion fab that can reliably etch all those transistors on a wafer of silicon.
More than a new rocket design, we need a new rocket manufacturing technology that cranks out high quality rockets for very little per each additional rocket.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Now instead of stealing designs from the russians maybe what will happen is that they will open their great firewall for a few seconds and steal our rocket designs and with no safety standards they will reach the moon first on their cheapo open source spacecrafts.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
ITAR restricts technology related to satellites and launch vehicles to a select group of individuals and prevents export to other countries without a lot of hassle. If it is open source, how are they going to prevent other nations from getting the plans to these "weapons"?
Further reading about ITAR can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations
This is what happens when Karl Rove leaves the building. (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/30/0215204)
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Lets start with the fact that the prime contractor for the Ares-I is ATK, who provides solid rocket booster for the thing. What Boeing got was upper stage contract.
So many aspects of the technology are protected by ITAR, that no matter of how open you may want to make any other parts, its not going to be "open" in any traditional sense.
Plus, there is high likelyhood that Ares-I will never fly, because its ( again ) grossly over its initial cost estimates, falls short of any reasonable performance goals, and is not liked by anybody but few managers and select few policicans with certain interest areas, who are shoving this completely bass-ackwards technical solution to the launch problem down everyones throats.
Just look up the DIRECT launcher concept and the discussion surrounding it, and see what i mean. It was conceived and proposed by a group within NASA under the radars to provide a sane, working alternative to the Ares-I fiasco, way sooner and way cheaper, with performance to spare.
Ares-I is the reason why the NASA lunar return plans are late, underwhelming and underperforming even before they got off the ground, and may well be in danger of cancellation, post elections.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
What seems cool about "open source" relative to this project is that it may make the specifications much more solid in all areas (any interested engineer can spot problems or suggest enhancements, not just NASA paid engineers, but at the same time I doubt that all of the rocket specs CAN be fully open sourced, because if you can put a rocket into space with sufficient accuracy to put a manned craft into lunar orbit, you can also put a warhead on that same rocket and plop it with decent accuracy anywhere in the world.
Which, given the rogue elements in our world and a number of fairly rich folks willing to fund the rogues, is, as you might surmise, NOT A GOOD THING.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Translation:"We need more people to blame"
The part that NASA is (purportedly, I haven't seen the contracts / specs yet) making open is the avionics architecture, the control computers, attitude and position sensors (GPS, Inertial navigation gyros, etc), and the software and physical network interconnects.
This isn't the rocket motors or physical stages. They want people to be able to propose upgraded computer systems, gyros, GPS units, etc. without having to rebuild the whole guidance system from scratch. So you make it modular, you use a technology like Avionics Full-Duplex Ethernet as the networking PHY and Datalink layers, you specify a realtime IP stack and the higher level protocols to use for transmitting status and position and control codes, etc.
Having to maintain 40-year-old computer and navigation equipment designs for the Space Shuttle has made everyone open to the idea of modular, upgradable, scalable, etc...
Anything that could threaten national security will be a blackbox.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Let's the Orbitors have a 120 flights pushing more than 830 people, 66 satellites, 32 orbital docking maneuvers, and 27,292 flight Hours.
So 14 people have been killed in two shuttle accidents. 14/830 is a 0.017 failure rate or just under 2%. An Astronaut is more likely to die by being killed in a drunk driving accident than on a shuttle flight.
Not bad considering it's the worlds only resuable space flight vehicle. Sure it's more expensive than forseen. and turn around time is greater than originally thought of. It is still more impressive than anything else. If Russia had finished the Buran I might consider that better, as without main engines on the vessel itself would lead to the faster turn around time that the shuttle was supposed to have.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
there are at least two other companies that have been awarded prime contracts for major system components (pratt & whitney / rocketdyne and atk thiokol). lockheed is supplying the raison d'etre in terms of the orion crew vehicle.
Don't forget to check those units of measure before you commit..
- B
Bandannarama
I now have a project to build in my backyard this weekend!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The summary also says that Boeing will be the prime contractor for the Ares 1. This is not true. The article is about Boeing being the prime contractor for the avionics. Incidentally, Boeing is also the prime contractor for the second stage structure. However, the first stage is being built by Alliant Techsystems (who also makes the nearly identical shuttle SRB's...that part of the contract was a shoe-in), the 2nd stage engine is being built by Pratt and Whitney, and the Orion spacecraft that the Ares is being designed to launch is contracted to Lockheed Martin.
Or ducks
The opposite of progress is congress
We have got to where we are today by having knowlege disseminated by journals and by having published standards. Poorly educated business types that think a financial gain should come from ANY advantage miss this. Open source is just a subset of the sharing that has enabled us to develop and improve technology.
I don't want to be involved in any ST:V plot
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Brilliant! We'll do the whole project with TDD. The Pb rocket is just part of the process.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is great for China. Like with OSS they'll benefit from it without spending a dime or contributing back.
In other news, NASA announced Microsoft has won the contract of the rocket crashing mechanism dispite losing the bid.
"Crashing mechanism shouldn't be under open bid the first place, we know who's the best and we only accept the best." NASA spokesman said.
"We can do this in our sleep." Microsoft spokesman said.
3......2......1...???where's the start button?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Granted, most of the code we write doesn't have quite that strong an incentive in terms of code quality. If the web page isn't exactly right, it's not that big a deal. But as a programmer in corporate environments for going on 20 years now, I wish the companies I worked and work for would have a similar emphasis "if this doesn't work right ____________ suffers, and we can do our jobs better than that...".
The Shuttle team just happens to be the best example of HOW to do it that I know of.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...