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Air Force Extends Plug-and-Play Spacecraft
coondoggie writes "Looking to build strategic satellites in days if need be, rather than months, the Air Force is pushing forward with what it calls plug-and-play spacecraft. This week it awarded a $500,000 order to Northrop Grumman to begin designing the plug-and-play spacecraft 'bus' which will offer standard interfaces for a variety of payload components, much like a laptop computer that immediately recognizes new hardware when it's plugged in, Northrop stated. The order was awarded under a contract that has a ceiling of $200 million."
read that as "starcraft", way more amusing
They discuss having a standard power bus, and a tcp/ip LAN with something like a COTS router. So in fact its not plug and play like USB on a laptop it is plug and play like attaching your laptop to your LAN. It is exactly that.
I expect it will have a hard coded configuration with static IP addresses though. DHCP is a single point of failure and I don't think the complexity is justified here.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
With spacecraft, as with computers, you have to have the right drivers. ...I don't know, it was just an opportunity to get a first post...
Hapablap: Oh...not the Harrier! We've got a war tomorrow.
Bob: [sees control panel with two buttons, STOP and FLY]
God bless the idiot-proof Air Force.
He presses the FLY button, and the jet taxis forward into a ditch.
Sideshow Bob switches to the Wright Brothers plane.
is what got the aliens beaten by a macintosh and a loser like jeff goldblum. compile everything in, disable all dynamic modules!
...never had so much meaning.
This for the Ancient, asgard, Goa'uld and types of non earth tech
This week it awarded a $500,000 order to Northrop Grumman to begin designing the plug-and-play spacecraft "bus" ... The order was awarded under a contract that has a ceiling of $200 million.
There is a pretty big difference between $500,000 and $200,000,000. So which is it Air Force?
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
So to extend Plug-and-Play spacecraft, they're paying $500,000 for a really long extension cord?
Not only do they need to do this with spacecraft and satellites, they need to do it with weapons systems across the board. Gun mounts, missile launchers, hard points, radar systems, everything. Let the separate military branches keep their identity and mission focus, but make sure all the hardware they're using works together.
An effort long overdue and a good place to start.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I find it odd that he specifically mentions "laptop computer" as if other kinds of computers can't do that too.
Could it be too much to ask, that this bus conform to an openly-specified standard, e.g., Wishbone?
I'm not saying it has to be Wishbone. I'm just thinking that it might be nice to avoid re-inventing the wheel. This could also have the side-effect of lowering the cost to the government (and the taxpayer who actually pays for it).
Typically one makes 2-3 satellites at a time; all are meant to be identical in case it's necessary to compare the two for repair. But completely forgetting the invention of interchangable parts, satellites seem to be *very* proprietary.
Ya think computers are bad about that? I'd rather have computers- at least they have PCI/AGP/PCI-Express busses, where satellites tend to be very unique, I'm told.
What processes *doesn't* improve when you make units from similar, interchangable parts? Would we have computers on so many desks if they weren't at least a little interchangable?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Maybe they should just use USB. I mean...it works, why spend another billion dollars to reinvent it?
And they could always use those cheap chinese webcams on the next generation airplanes.
Actually it'll be interesting to see where light peak goes...
They are using the latest edition of Windows ME.
Why liken it to a laptop, when desktops have been using buses to allow major components to be easily changed for decades. Even apple products used to be able to do it (maybe some of them still can, I wouldn't know).
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
If you want to know where you are coming from, a bus interface commonly used right now on satellites in U.S. and Europe is MIL-STD-1553B. This is basically a dual-redundant differential 1 Mb/s bus over a wire pair. There's a single bus controller which initiates all the transactions, and up to 31 remote terminals which respond to the bus controller.
What is a bit surprising is that for military aircraft, current designs have been moving from 1553 to Firewire (which is plug and play). So that may suggest that Firewire would be unsuitable for satellites.
All their hardware will be using a single bus, meaning that anything that compromises that bus can compromise any of their equipment. Was the guy who designed this, by any chance, a long haired British man whose sleeping with a stunning blonde who asks a lot of questions?
Half a billion for reinventing the wheel? I mean, we have USB for a long time already, how hard can it be to reimplement it in military harware?
You mentioned the existing PnP spec, but didn't provide any details! The effort is called Space Plug and Play Avionics (SPA).
Also I'm sure you already know this, but for the rest of the /. crowd: SpaceWire is an existing standard bus (like a router), but it doesn't currently have any PnP features.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Just plug it in... it's going to say "Hey I see you plugged in a new device," and it's going to load in the appropriate drivers...you'll notice that this satellite will... whoa!
And what I will be doing? Ok? i am going to the site sector obzora!!!
Apollo module.
Installing the software for your new Apollo module.
Your new Apollo module is installed. You should restart your spaceship for the changes to take effect.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Is there a reason they don't just use usb or normal networking? Perhaps I'm just trivializing space technology, but what's the difference between space computers and home computers [besides the fact they use real-time operating systems]? Surely that just means the computers never go to sleep?
I'm sure that technology already exists - so it just needs $200 Billion to test and make sure it works in space?
blog.idigitall.com
-1 Party Pooper
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just curious, but has anyone else taken a step back and wondered *why* the USAF needs to build satellites more quickly? In reality, they are probably just planning ahead for when giant satellite killing lasers litter the ground and they start dropping like flies (or whatever else the planners have come up with). If this trend continues, will we launch fleets of these things? We already have a pretty large cloud of sattelites orbiting the earth.
Obviously lowering cost is a good thing, but not something the military is known for. I find it interesting that the big push in the military has been on for cheap and fast satellites (fast seems more important that cheap), since about 2005. That would be around the time the Chinese demonstrated their ability to kill space vehicles, and at the same time pollute the orbit with junk by doing it. It might also be needed in the case of things like solar flares that leave the military and critical civilian sats crippled.
The only solution is to be able to deploy on mass satellites cheaply and quickly as they are destroyed or knocked out.
I see one serious flaw in this strategy. They might be cheap now, but in a conflict with China those chips and components are not going to be so cheap anymore. The same might be said after a major solar flare, with everyone scrambling to rebuild fried technology.
This really should be a proper DARPA seeded contest for Universities and guys in their back yard or Open source it.
Living in Chile
They could provide "flies-for-sure", modeled after Microsoft's highly "plays-for-sure-except-on-new-years'-eve-and-on-unsupported-players" system.
Car companies have been developing car networks which would probably have similar requirements for satellites. Actuators and electrical control units are in cars and in satellites.
FlexRay is currently under development. With a few modifications I'm sure it could be adapted to work in a satellite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexRay