FOSS CAD and 3D Modeling Software?

Paul server guy writes "I work at a privately funded, open source, manned, return to the moon mission — Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon. Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too. What we are looking for is CAD software that we can feed into Blender (or the like) to do 3D modeling with. Many of the engineers have tried working with Blender and Art of Illusion, but have not been pleased. They want to just draw the parts, then feed them to the art people who will run them through the 3D modelers for videos, illustrations and such. What is your preference?"

Comments

You've raised $130 out of $7500

[zonky]

It looks like that campaign was supposed to end last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste time answering your questions now, given the seemingly unrealistic goal, when you can't even format a donation box? Or is the a scheme to get money out of stupid geeks by driving traffic to your website?

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Deadstick]

given the seemingly unrealistic goal

-Right. Now, uh, item four: attainment of world supremacy within the next five years. Uh, Francis, you've been doing some work on this.

-Yeah. Thank you, Reg. Well, quite frankly, siblings, I think five years is optimistic, unless we can smash the Roman empire within the next twelve months.

rj

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[QuantumG]

Ya know, it seems to be a common occurrence to find space projects with horrid web sites. Consider:

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
http://www.interorbital.com/

Both real groups doing real hardware right now, with websites that look like scams.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[auntieNeo]

Or is the a scheme to get money out of stupid geeks by driving traffic to your website?

Drive geeks to their website? Everyone knows /. readers don't RTFA.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[fm6]

They've got plenty of traffic now. Rather more than they can handle, it seems. If they can't build a web server that scales up, what makes them think they can build a spaceship?

Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model? Because the big problem with space travel is that there's never been one. Yeah, yeah, if Congress hadn't cut off the tap, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that space travel is going to have to start paying for itself eventually. Otherwise you'll never see anything except political vanity projects like Apollo and the ISS. These do produce some good science and technological spinoffs, but never enough to justify the billions poured into them.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Blakey Rat]

Hey, be fair. There's something to be said for goofy hobby projects-- like the people who spend thousands of dollars building pumpkin launchers, for example. If that's the spirit in which this all is intended, then hell-- why not? "Building a rocket" just becomes an event to hang around with goofy people and drink beer.

That said, the poster of this story seems to serious for that, and their website is completely busted.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[mmcxii]

I hear they do like the pictures tho.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[bl8n8r]

> it seems to be a common occurrence to find space projects with horrid web sites.

Even more common is finding horrid software (and licensing) behind professional looking websites:

Consider:
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
http://www.apple.com/webapps/

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[ajlisows]

"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?

"This dork can't even find himself a single woman to have sex with him, what makes him think he can write software that will attract millions of users?"

You see, it is possible to be highly competent at one thing and be not very competent in another. Even if they have the loose relationship of being two things that geeks tend to think are pretty cool, such as Engineering Spaceships and developing web sites and maintaining a web server.

Obviously I have not been able to view the web page due to it being slashdotted, but it is a good possibility that they didn't put much thought or effort into it. They probably thought "Hey, why don't we just cobble together a small web presence in case anyone wants to donate any money or otherwise contribute to our project. Let's not spend much time on it though as our aim is space travel, not web development.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[fm6]

"Goofy projects" do have a point: having fun. Fun is an important part of being human.

This isn't a goofy project. It's a lame one.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there is very little evidence that Interorbital has produced any real hardware in the past few years. Plenty of models and drawings, but no actual hardware (let alone flight tests).

(Posted AC because I'm in the industry, and Interorbital has made themselves a pain in the past for people who say this sort of thing about them. But don't take my AC word for it: go try to find evidence they've built or flown something. If they have, there should be plenty of info, right?)

If you want real web sites, check out people like Armadillo, XCOR, Masten, or Unreasonable, for example.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[fm6]

I think there's more overlap between space travel and setting up a web server than there is between surgery and cooking. In any case, this isn't so much about specific technical skills as an ability to plan. If somebody can't anticipate the problems of running a web site, they probably can't anticipate the problems of running a much bigger project.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[QuantumG]

Hi Charles, how ya doin'? :)

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[sopssa]

Masten

Masten Space Systems will fly anything you want into space and back for $250/kg:

Not at all that pricey actually. Could easily launch a few pizzas there, just as a pleasant surprise for some astronauts walking by.

Launching myself would still be like $25 000 though, even if I go without a space suit.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[triorph]

I really think you are over-estimating how much the average airspace engineer cares about website development. I think the parallel here is to ask: "This website developer can't even build a spaceship? Why do they think they'll be able to design web-sites." And although I will admit that designing a website is far far simpler than building even a small part of a spaceship, you still have to realise that they are completely different skills. I will admit though that I think these people are going to fail for different ideological reasons.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[khallow]

Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model?

If it's a non-profit and they aren't looking to create a sustainable business, then they don't need a great business model. One very useful purpose for such organizations is risk retirement and technology demonstrations. They can try new technologies and approaches (here, if they're remotely serious, then they'll at least help explore the use of FOSS software for designing space projects). A more advanced non-profit that is actually doing stuff in space can explore common obstacles to space activities (like ISRU, teleoperations, how to do stuff in space on a shoestring budget, etc).

My thinking on this is simply that there are huge obstacles to space activities. Some like the cost of access to space are beyond the resources of a small organization to change. Others are simply things that haven't been tried yet (like communication/control of a space vehicle with off-the-shelf hardware and software). An organization like this might reduce the cost of low-end creation of space engineering designs for all future participants by a few hundred to few thousand dollars just with the proposed activity mentioned in the Slashdot summary.

Retiring risks like this reduce barrier of entry for new companies. Now, knocking $300 off a billion dollar in development costs is a drop in the ocean, but over the long term, retirement of risks can greatly reduce the cost of a startup or business expansion. For example, a good part of the reason why SpaceX and Scaled Composites had extremely cheap development programs for their respective vehicles is because of the research done by others (NASA, Roscosmos (and the Soviet predecessor), private US businesses, etc). The EELV program (Boeing and Lockheed building rockets, Delta IV and Atlas V with payloads in the 10-25 ton range) exists in part because the companies in question had figured out (and demonstrated to the US Department of Defense that they knew) how to design, develop, and launch rockets.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[w0mprat]

Yet, if the websites were TOO slick and polished you wouldn't believe they were out there doing real work would you?

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[budgenator]

"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?"
Kind of like an engineer that can't even use blender! seriously I've used blender and even liked it. but the UI is an art in itself, the learning curve is very steep and the skills learned fall off rapidly if you don't use it regularly.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[rickb928]

I don't need mhy surgeon strassing over breakfast. She can BUY breakfast.

And these hotshot spacefarers can BUY a functional website.

If you're serious, you'll do things right. My surgeon will have proper equipment, competent staff, and access to adequate facilities. These hotshots either take their website seriously, or they don't, or this is what a serious spacefarer thinks is a serious website.

Judge them by their appearances? I choose my surgeon on both recommendation, reputation, and presentation. Not many private space ventures have recommendations, and reputation is similarly somewhat fragile.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Ricken]

What website?

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[nashv]

Ditto. Also, I would imagine that spaceship building seems to be a much more complicated (euphemistically speaking) engineering problem than getting a website right. The underlying insinuation that these things are somewhat comparable skill-sets in their "coolness" factor just made me laugh.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[ajlisows]

I realize I embellished a little on the surgery and cooking thing, but it helped the illustrate the point.

Also, planning for day to day traffic is one thing. I'm guessing this site doesn't get that many page views on a given day. Planning for a Slashdotting is another thing entirely.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[ajlisows]

I've managed to get on the web site now. It isn't a whiz-bang web site with all sorts of awesome web features, but it does the job. Their content is a little slim but I assume this project is in the early stages. It appears that they have partnered with in some way with the University of Western Ontario (Enrollment: 30,000+) and the Oakland Univeristy (Enrollment: 20,000+). Now we aren't talking Harvard here but we aren't talking University of Phoenix, either. Their business partners.....I don't know about them. I tried to go to one web site and got the firefox "Get me the hell out of here, this page got jacked" message.

It should also be noted that their Web Master is currently operating out of the Sahara Desert. I'm guessing this site is new and she hasn't had much time to work on it. Not to mention, hey! If I'm donate money to a project that is supposed to sent people to space, I'd sure as hell rather them use the money to you know, send people to space rather than make their web site look all pretty with tons of Flash animation and the like.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Eil]

You'll take note that Artist and Webmaster are #1 and #2 respectively on their "help wanted" list. Perhaps you could volunteer instead of complaining?

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[fm6]

Planning for a Slashdotting is another thing entirely.

It's not so much planning for Slashdotting as knowing that you have to.

That said, Slashdot doesn't have to be equivalent to a DoS attack, not in this era of cloud computing. And cloud web servers are not very hard to set up.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You know, that's a bizarre occurance. Slashdot takes down sites so much the name has become a verb. Yet, nobody reads the article before posting. How do so many geeks manage that? I mean, I post my knee-jerk reactions to a site, but at least I have the courtesy to not cost them bandwidth.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[GF678]

They probably thought "Hey, why don't we just cobble together a small web presence in case anyone wants to donate any money or otherwise contribute to our project. Let's not spend much time on it though as our aim is space travel, not web development.

The following I learnt the harsh way:

Image sells.

Present a nice image for your company, people will think better of you than a company which just slaps some crap together. Doesn't matter if the company with a crap website produces better product, image is important in getting the attention necessary for whatever goals you seek. It's the same reason why the geeks who get all the success are the ones who have learnt that social skills are more important than technical know-how.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Paul server guy]

That was a brief look at a membership drive. The project is ongoing. Ironically, the tool that manages the membership and donations needs some work. (The tool works fine, we are just learning how to use it.) Why don't you stop by and help clean that up?

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Paul server guy]

You'll take note that Artist and Webmaster are #1 and #2 respectively on their "help wanted" list. Perhaps you could volunteer instead of complaining?

Correct and thank you.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Paul server guy]

I've managed to get on the web site now. It isn't a whiz-bang web site with all sorts of awesome web features, but it does the job. Their content is a little slim but I assume this project is in the early stages. It appears that they have partnered with in some way with the University of Western Ontario (Enrollment: 30,000+) and the Oakland Univeristy (Enrollment: 20,000+). Now we aren't talking Harvard here but we aren't talking University of Phoenix, either.

Yes, The project is new. We are at the stage where we are looking for volunteers to help.

And, just so you (well, all of the rest of you) know, Western has one of the best Planetary Sciences departments in Canada, and are the first node outside of the US in NASA's Lunar Research Network. (Here I go, Killing another page. - http://clrn.uwo.ca/) We also work with University of North Dakota, who have a great deal of space experience.

Their business partners.....I don't know about them. I tried to go to one web site and got the firefox "Get me the hell out of here, this page got jacked" message.

I'd like to know which one. We'll fix that.

It should also be noted that their Web Master is currently operating out of the Sahara Desert. I'm guessing this site is new and she hasn't had much time to work on it. Not to mention, hey! If I'm donate money to a project that is supposed to sent people to space, I'd sure as hell rather them use the money to you know, send people to space rather than make their web site look all pretty with tons of Flash animation and the like.

Well, thank you. We also need volunteers, but that is painfully obvious right now. (Like someone who can either provide the web space, or help us setup the servers across multiple links... :)

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Paul server guy]

They've got plenty of traffic now. Rather more than they can handle, it seems. If they can't build a web server that scales up, what makes them think they can build a spaceship?

Because they aren't necessarily related, and the guys who are doing the rocket science aren't the guys (well girl) handling the web space...

Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model? Because the big problem with space travel is that there's never been one. Yeah, yeah, if Congress hadn't cut off the tap, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that space travel is going to have to start paying for itself eventually. Otherwise you'll never see anything except political vanity projects like Apollo and the ISS. These do produce some good science and technological spinoffs, but never enough to justify the billions poured into them.

You Sir, are right. You have completely hit the nail on the head. Contrary to what the people below are saying, The tech is easy. (Well, Relatively so.) We have known how to do this for 40 years, what we don't know how to do, not even NASA knows how to do, is pay for it!

We have several business models, one for the Open and donated side of things, one for the pay for and get paid for side of things. (There will be hardware and services for sale. Hardware like toy rovers, usable Space/Lunar surface suits, outposts, (Call them quick assembling emergency, self sufficient housing), All sorts of goodies) right down to the simple NASCAR style "Pay me and I'll give you a big sticker on the hardware!" We will indeed (Of course) sell samples, and seats to space, and in the outpost, etc...

Think about what America's Cup teams cost, or even NASCAR teams cost. This is certainly doable.

So, come by, donate some, and, for now, more importantly, come and volunteer.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[sourcerror]

Mod parent funny, jees ...

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[fractoid]

"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?

Sounds like she could quite easily do so while trying to make you a ham sammitch. Give her points for trying though! :)

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[damburger]

These guys do not have 'real hardware' - they have some photos of metal tubes. This hardly constitutes a rocket program.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two and only two sorts of people, those who RTFA and those who comment.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[grumbel]

Blender isn't CAD software. No matter how great the interface would be, its just not the right for the job of modeling parts that should end up as real hardware.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[mwvdlee]

But they're doing rocket-science design schematics in Blender; obviously they're on the right track.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[mwvdlee]

I'm guessing you're part of that "Unreasonable" thing? Why else would somebody post that one as an example of a real website.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[daffmeister]

Well, the delays to updating the site might have something to do with the fact that the web-master is currently operating out of the Sahara desert in Morocco (go to the bottom of the page).

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[dwilkinson]

It looks like that campaign was supposed to end last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste time answering your questions now, given the seemingly unrealistic goal, when you can't even format a donation box? Or is the a scheme to get money out of stupid geeks by driving traffic to your website?

Instead of spreading rumors you could find out the facts. This a full year campaign to recruit 250 people that has barely started. Nothing unrealistic about that goal. The widget only represents sign-ups for this year completed through the website not total membership. I was in the middle of changing the title on the widget to represent this more clearly when the fur started flying. The stand-alone version of CiviCRM provides a bland sign-up page. We were trying to correct it while our web master was in the Sahara before making a campaign push.

Debi-Lee Wilkinson
VP. Membership and Development, the OpenLuna Foundation, Inc
(and yes, a rocket scientist floundering with web design - I would rather be flying rockets)

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[hh4m]

The bizarre occurrence relates to an old saying, which in the /. context reads something like:

"Those who post seldom read, those who read seldom post."

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[DynaSoar]

> It looks like that campaign was supposed to end
> last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste
> time answering your questions

It looks like someone asked a question about software. Why should we waste our time listening to the grunting noises you make when trying to force your head up your ass past the elbows?

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[houghi]

This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?

Reminds me of something that was actually asked at a docter who was becoming a surgeon. It went like "If you can not even control your hand to hold a pen and produce something readable, how do you think you can become a surgeon and not slice open things you should not?" Not sure what the answer was, but apparently sufficient to pass.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[houghi]

I think a website is harder. I mean, putting a man on the moon should not be that hard. It's not like it's rocket science.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[vegiVamp]

Reputation. The httpd hears it's site is on slashdot and instinctively falls over and starts bleeding.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[QuantumG]

Which guys in particular? Copenhagen Suborbitals have already built 3 different hybrids.. this upcoming one will be their biggest yet. You can tell which ones are doing real rocket work because they ask questions like "so, err, how close should I let these spectators get?" And then get upset when you suggest they not allow spectators at their rocket tests.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[tokul]

How do so many geeks manage that?

One geek putting interesting content on inadequate hardware or network connection.

Summary must be interesting enough to attract site viewers.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Blakey Rat]

The people who visit the links don't post in the comments.

So you have a ton of people who visit the links, take down the server, then just shrug and do something else. Then you have an entire other set of people who hardly ever visit the links, but when they try the first group has already taken the site down, and you post a gripe about it in the comments.

Considering the quality of most Slashdot submissions, I'm guessing the people who *don't* visit and read the links are better-educated than the ones who read the comments-- especially since the first few comments usually correct inaccuracies (or plain lies) in the story.

Woe be to those who only read the summary without reading the comments *or* visiting the links, God knows what crap those people are loading their brains with.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[flyneye]

Well answer it for me then, zonky. I'm just a poor luthier with no web site, damn little production and I do my stuff on Q-cad to feed hardware specs to a friend with a machine shop across the country for custom metal hardware on some models.Of course I make my jigs and templates from CAD files,too. I hand carve or copy carve my wood parts. I've been dreaming of home building my own CNC to do necks and solid body instruments. I would love to be able to convert some of my 2d drawings to 3d for both tool paths and maybe put 3d representations out there on websites so customers could twiddle an instrument around and get a good look at it.
          While I can appreciate flushing out some fraudulent space cadets, I would like to hear the /. communitys actual opinions on this.
So without further adieu , let me hijack this discussion.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[budgenator]

That's true, it would probably be easier to use google's sketchup than blender for CAD LOL. A friend of mine used to work for the auto industry turning real CAD files into real 3D Files for TV commercials and cleaning up laser scan of cars. The laser scanner was so accurate is would pick up the texture in the paint, so he spent most of his day smoothing that out.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[KDR_11k]

That does constitute evidence of WMDs though.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[laederkeps]

You know, that's a bizarre occurance. Slashdot takes down sites so much the name has become a verb. Yet, nobody reads the article before posting. How do so many geeks manage that? I mean, I post my knee-jerk reactions to a site, but at least I have the courtesy to not cost them bandwidth.

There's your answer. Those who make comments don't read the articles. Those who read the articles don't comment.
I didn't RTFA.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Jon_S]

Those sites are so busy nobody goes there anymore.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[DrifterX79]

Why can engineer not use Blender? Blender easy. Put material into Blender, press Blend. Voila! Two easy steps to Blender.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you check out their sponsor page, they seem to be funded by the technomystics. Not that that necessarily means anything, but come on. If they have a serious business plan they shouldn't have to result to such quackery.

Posted AC because im working to get into the industry and parents boilerplate scared me :D

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Anonymous Coward]

I regularly use and appreciate Blender, AutoCAD and Vectorworks and I can assure you that Blender is NOT a CAD program and that there is a difference between a 3D rendering and animation program like Blender and a 2D/3D modelling and drafting program like AutoCAD and vectorworks, for which I would love to have a FOSS replacement for.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[ajlisows]

Paul Server Guy - Your web site is down again, or I'd go back and check. I thought it was the 3rd or 4th company listed where I got the "Get me the hell out of here" message. That is something you definitely might want to check out. After all, I'm not sure if Internet Explorer gives those warnings so if the page is hijacked with Malware it probably wouldn't impress potential volunteers/potential donators if they get infested visiting one of your partners. ;)

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[SteveFoerster]

Now we aren't talking Harvard here but we aren't talking University of Phoenix, either.

Too bad, actually. If we were, the flight wouldn't be that great, but there'd be a hell of a lot of paying passengers....

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Rhaban]

You know, that's a bizarre occurance. Slashdot takes down sites so much the name has become a verb. Yet, nobody reads the article before posting. How do so many geeks manage that? I mean, I post my knee-jerk reactions to a site, but at least I have the courtesy to not cost them bandwidth.

I usually open the link in a new tab, post a comment, then read the article (or just close the tab without reading it)

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[sourcerror]

It seems I gave you my karma. But at least you're not modded Insightful.

Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not believe there are enough Slashdotters that have enough knowledge to get the actual joke so I'll explain it:
as witnessed on for example aRocket IOS thinks it's Charles Pooley whenever anyone says anything bad about them, which is funny because it ignores that nobody in the know ever says anything nice about them so why focus on Charles like that? :D

BRL-CAD

[maxume]

BRL-CAD is probably the only full fledged package. Link:

http://brlcad.org/

Re:BRL-CAD

[BikeHelmet]

Sure, it looks like he's plugging his website,

Don't worry. Nobody ever reads the article.

Re:BRL-CAD

[digitalunity]

BRL-CAD is probably just as powerful mathematically but it lacks all of the features from SolidWorks and Pro/E that make them easy to use.

There really is no OSS alternative for professional CAD users. If the BRL-CAD folks would take hints from the commercial CAD market with respect to UI usability, they would find a big uptick in user count.

Re:BRL-CAD

[pipingguy]

I seem to remember that is was used for ballistic simulations for the Abrams tank.

Re:BRL-CAD

[jank1887]

unfortunately, the industry standard is parasolid based solid modeling. (Solidworks and Pro/E) Using BRL-CAD probably won't give the mechanical designers what they're looking for.

Re:BRL-CAD

[Baloo Uriza]

If you're defining the usability bar as AutoCAD, you're missing the mark. AutoCAD's just following whatever UI standard they get handed for Windows logo certification. Usually take a lot of effort to get a fresh AutoCAD install to the point of being usable, that is, no toolbars, no ribbon, just a workspace and a command line.

Re:BRL-CAD

[Baloo Uriza]

I have to wonder, for reasons completely unrelated to the abovementioned project, is there a Debian package for that?

Re:BRL-CAD

[Paul server guy]

Thank you...

Re:BRL-CAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but these aren't professional CAD users. From the summary it seems they want to draw things that look a bit like components of a rocket, for promotional materials. Heaven help these fuckers if they plan to launch a man to the moon with stuff created using Blender and printed on a MakerBot.

Re:BRL-CAD

[vegiVamp]

Oh, you mean it's suffering from Gimp-disease.

Re:BRL-CAD

[digitalunity]

No, they're suffering from this-isn't-goddamned-1972-unix. A cryptic CLI is no match for a well designed UI when it comes to solid modeling.

Re:BRL-CAD

[Anonymous Coward]

PPppppptttthhh...
OK now I have to clean my monitor. Commercial CAD UI's have ALWAYS been total crap! They are just starting to become almost usable by normal people but that is something that has only started in the last few years. Unfortunately most of them also have to keep their old fart users happy so they are bogged down with all sorts of legacy interface stuff. SolidWorks is probably the easiest to use, and with ProE just now coming to the idea that 100000 embedded drop-down menus isn't such a great idea. Most of the time I need something made I just take out a sheet of paper, 12 inch wooden ruler and a #2 pencil. Of course that is because I only need to build stuff that is fairly simple. I have yet to find a software package that is simple enough to be usable by engineers that only draw one or two things a year. That is, it needs to have an intuitive interface that I wouldn't forget how to do something simple the next time I pick it up 6 months from now. (Pro-E isn't like riding a bike)

No Chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too."

Ideology won't get you to the moon.

Re:No Chance.

[spinspin]

Wasn't it ideology that got us to the moon the first time?

Re:No Chance.

[adamkennedy]

No. The first time it was equal parts arms race, chest-beating nationalism, and 100 billion dollars.

Re:No Chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Pardon the troll, but with that kind of spin the trip to the moon sounds downright evil.

Re:No Chance.

[Capsaicin]

with that kind of spin the trip to the moon sounds downright evil.

Compared to fighting it out throughout the developing world (as they both did), the Russian v US race to the moon was anything but evil.

Re:No Chance.

[aitikin]

...and less technology than you carry in your cell phone.

Re:No Chance.

[deniable]

No, it was a manager publicly promising a short delivery time for the project. The manager got replaced part way through, but the customer still wanted it and the vendors were locked in.

Re:No Chance.

[Blakey Rat]

The moon (and a lot of the space program) was sold as a way to put nukes somewhere where the enemy couldn't sabotage them. The first country to be able to launch nukes from the moon would win the Cold War-- but it turned out a lot harder than we first imagined, so they pretended to do a bunch of science instead. News flash: the moon has rocks and dust!!

Re:No Chance.

[Jane Q. Public]

That's a load of crap. Once they found out beyond doubt that they did not have the technology (and they didn't) to hit a target reliably from orbit, there would have been no point trying it from the moon. Besides, the moon is a lousy launch platform for either offensive or defensive missiles... you can see them coming much too long in advance.

The physics just don't hold up your argument, dude.

Re:No Chance.

[Third Position]

Wasn't it ideology that got us to the moon the first time?

Well, that and a fat tax-payer stuffed wallet, yes.

Re:No Chance.

[steve buttgereit]

I'm old enough to remember when 100 Billion dollars use to be a lot of money.

Re:No Chance.

[nabsltd]

Besides, the moon is a lousy launch platform for either offensive or defensive missiles... you can see them coming much too long in advance.

I think that "brilliant crowbars" launched from the moon would be hard to stop even if you knew they were coming, especially if there were enough of them.

Re:No Chance.

[Kymermosst]

News flash: the moon has rocks and dust!!

Bullshit. It's discoid-shaped and made out of cheese.

Re:No Chance.

[TBoon]

Given that the US seemed to win the space race something like 3 - 8, I'd say no. The Russians beat the US to quite a lot of important milestones along the way to the moon. In the early years they were way ahead, and it wasn't until the end the US surpassed them.

Hadn't their ready-to-go manned lunar rocket exploded (destroying the launch-site) 2 weeks before Apollo 11 launched, they could have been first to walk the moon as well. Shame they didn't, as the US probably would have to go to Mars just to declare final victory...

Re:No Chance.

[Jane Q. Public]

Sure. "Thor" (as the technology is known) is certainly feasible... now. It wasn't in the 60s.

Re:No Chance.

[icebrain]

I wouldn't exactly call the N-1 "ready to go". Its first flight (Feb. 1969) exploded 69 seconds after liftoff; its second flight (the one in July) blew up 23 seconds after liftoff. Even if it had flown successfully in July, it wouldn't have had anyone on it--not even the Soviets were daft enough to put a crew on a rocket that had only flown once before.* And they certainly wouldn't have been doing anything more than an earth-orbit checkout. It would have taken really good luck on the Soviets' part, plus another Apollo 1-level disaster to NASA, to give the Soviets even a slim chance of putting someone on the moon first. And that's being generous. The N-1 never did work right; something about having 30 engines in the first stage just left too many things to go wrong. All four flights ended in explosions.

*Of course, the US did exactly that 12 years later. Actually, they had a crew on the very first space shuttle launch--no step-by-step or unmanned testing with that one.

Re:No Chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, grandpa, time for your meds. No, you can't call Grandma--you need to eat your pills and then we'll hose you off and put you to bed. Breakfast was ten hours ago; it's night, now. See? It's dark outside.

Re:No Chance.

[biryokumaru]

I'm fairly certain he's right, though. Politicians didn't know that it was ridiculous to talk about launching nukes from the moon with 60's technology, but they knew that the ability to launch nukes from the moon would be a fairly substantial gain in the cold war. I believe I read that it was actually a major selling point, although I can't recall where I came across it.

Re:No Chance.

[Baloo Uriza]

Sounds like ideology to me!

Re:No Chance.

[Paul server guy]

"Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too."

Ideology won't get you to the moon.

It may not, but it doesn't hurt to try...

Re:No Chance.

[Paul server guy]

*Of course, the US did exactly that 12 years later. Actually, they had a crew on the very first space shuttle launch--no step-by-step or unmanned testing with that one.

And they intend to do that with Ares as well. No cargo, just people.

Re:No Chance.

[cof]

No. It was, in the words of Tom Lehrer, "good old American know how. Supplied by good old Americans like Wernher Von Bruan".

Re:No Chance.

[fractoid]

News flash: the moon has rocks and dust!!

Rubbish! NASA's best kept secret is that the moon is actually comprised of tits.

Re:No Chance.

[guyminuslife]

Yeah, nowadays when I drop a $100 billion coin, I don't even bother to bend over and pick it up.

Re:No Chance.

[Arancaytar]

So we can put a man on the moon, but we can't write an open-source CAD program?

Re:No Chance.

[Blakey Rat]

That's what they were *sold*. That doesn't mean it was feasible. Scientists don't control your funding, politicians do.

Re:No Chance.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

What actually put the nail in the coffin of the Soviet attempt was that their chief space program man who was responsible for their earlier successes died.

The 30 engine unwieldy monstrosity that was N-1 was a direct result of his ambitious underlings going after each other throats, with the one who was most politically connected, but also the least suitable for the job, winning.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Re:No Chance.

[Jane Q. Public]

That may be so, but then we come back to my original argument: once it became obvious (and it did) that the technology was not feasible from orbit, it should have been triply obvious, long before any moon shots, that it wouldn't be feasible from the moon.

Re:No Chance.

[biryokumaru]

And then we come back to my argument: it was never obvious to politicians, because they don't have a clue.

Re:No Chance.

[Jane Q. Public]

Sorry but I won't buy that. It may be true that politicians in general have no scientific bent, but most of them aren't THAT stupid. This is a pretty common-sense thing: if your gun can't reliably hit a target from 50 yards, it won't be able to hit it from 500.

Re:No Chance.

[Jane Q. Public]

And just to be clear: dropping smart rocks ("Brilliant Pebbles") from orbit turned out to be infeasible at the time of Reagan's administration; it sure as hell was not remotely feasible during Kennedy's.

Re:No Chance.

[nurb432]

And lots of tax dollars.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you want to go to the moon?

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

Do you really have to ask this question, isn't it obvious?

He answered already: they want to put a man on a moon and a woman.

It's a ploy for the man to get the woman. Obviously he figured that the only way to do so is to get her to the moon and basically eliminate the entire world from competing.

Also, he probably will limit her life support supplies, such as air, and she will only find out about it there and will be forced to beg him for this stuff. You'd think under the circumstances he is bound to get her finally.

Re:Why?

[__aaclcg7560]

The same reason a chicken wants to cross the road. It's over yonder.

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

Why is the parent moded funny? It's a very very reasonable approach. It really is informative well, and maybe insightful.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

they want to put a man on a moon, and a woman.

To steal a bit from Steve Martin, I've discovered a secret method for doing this, but you have to follow the formula exactly.

Are you listening? OK, here it is, i.e. the formula.

Step one: put a man on the moon.

Now for step two, you need to call the woman on the phone...

Re:Why?

[Borg Bucolic]

"Good luck Mr. Goresky wherever you are." (Armstrong)

Re:Why?

[fractoid]

Why is the parent moded funny? It's a very very reasonable approach. It really is informative well, and maybe insightful.

Rubbish. She'll tell him what a great friend he is and then, just when he thinks he's in, she'll say "I don't think of you that way even though you ARE the last man on the face of the earth^H^H^H^H^Hmoon."

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

But it is a perfect plan. Does she decide to do so, he would have a range of options, from not giving her air at all, to providing her with an air mix with some 'kick' in it. Either way, she will end up in his hands, dead or alive and funky!

Re:Why?

[steelfood]

they want to put a man on a moon and a woman.

Where do I sign up to be put on a woman?

Re:Why?

[roman_mir]

with the author of the story, of-course, first you have to be put on a moon though, then on a woman. She may or may not agree, but in those conditions you shouldn't have too much trouble.

FreeCAD

[dbc]

FreeCAD https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page has made huge progress recently.

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

I looked briefly at the FreeCAD, it is impressive for a F/OSS project but I'm afraid it's not good enough yet to even make a plastic case for yer cell phone, let alone a propellant tank. For example:

• There is no "Assembly" workbench with its numerous constraints.
• I don't see auxiliary geometry, such as work planes, axes and points.
• I don't see projected contours and relations between parts. That's a super-major hole.
• The list of features that can be created is quite basic. Professional CADs (SolidWorks, Inventor, SolidEdge, ProE) have lots more, and you need them.
• There is no pipe and harness workbench, sheet metal workbench, molds, gears, kinematic, stress, thermal, vibration - you name them they don't have them. You'd think stress and vibration are optional on a rocket?

The OP asked "what free s/w to use to build hardware to fly to the moon." My answer would be: "it doesn't matter, it won't work anyway." If I were to do the whole project, I would be first concerned about financing the whole project; cost of the best software on the market would be a drop in the ocean compared to everything else. People who started the moon project with a predetermined opinion what tools they will use won't get anywhere, not in the rocket science at least.

Re:FreeCAD

[ivan256]

tftp said:

Since this CAD program doesn't have modern features that commercial CAD programs just started adding in the last 15 years, it's never going to work to design something that was already done over four decades ago.

Wait, what?

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

Ok, let me explain. Either you buy an excellent 3D drafting / modeling software, or you spend 1,000x that much on paper analyses done by PhDs and on testing of real parts done at ranges and in test flights. The latter approach was used for Moon rockets - cost was no object. Those guys are welcome to borrow $100B and do the same; or they can borrow $100-200K and buy the best tools that are available today. But using play-do for things that life depends on is, IMO, beyond silly. I'd call it criminal, though as someone else already said they have no chance to even get to the point where they can kill someone with their rockets.

I do mechanical design and simulations, by the way, in SolidWorks/CosmosWorks, in Inventor, and with CoCreate/Nastran tools. Probably more. So I know a thing or two about this.

Re:FreeCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

  But using play-do for things that life depends on is, IMO, beyond silly. I'd call it criminal, though as someone else already said they have no chance to even get to the point where they can kill someone with their rockets.

You don't even fucking know how to read a summary, how can you possibly [know a thing or two about this]?

Re:FreeCAD

[Progman3K]

There is no "Assembly" workbench with its numerous constraints.
I don't see auxiliary geometry, such as work planes, axes and points.
I don't see projected contours and relations between parts. That's a super-major hole.
The list of features that can be created is quite basic. Professional CADs (SolidWorks, Inventor, SolidEdge, ProE) have lots more, and you need them.
There is no pipe and harness workbench, sheet metal workbench, molds, gears, kinematic, stress, thermal, vibration - you name them they don't have them. You'd think stress and vibration are optional on a rocket?

You know what?
Your comment makes me wonder what Armadillo Aerospace could come up with (in software) for their own designs and then what technology they would eventually bring back to games as a result...

Wild...

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

Your comment makes me wonder what Armadillo Aerospace could come up with (in software) for their own designs

This is not a new problem, really. What a startup didn't hear such a great idea from a young, enthusiastic engineer? "Boss, don't buy Quickbooks, don't waste $150, I will write the stuff for you for free!" If the boss doesn't know any better, such a proposition is usually a total loss. (Just have a look at QuickBooks for the proof.)

There are at least two issues at work here. First, do you have an expertise? And second, will your resources be better spent on something else, new perhaps, instead of reinventing the wheel?

As major CADs go, a mere $20K for a full SolidWorks seat is peanuts. Most of the labor that goes into the software is spent on interfaces; the rest is in licensed, very specialized libraries that do their job. For example, most 3D CADs use 3rd party math libraries that calculate all the solids and do all the heavy lifting. Simulation is very frequently done with 3rd party tools also, just because it's so hard to do fast. Ansys licenses their solvers to Autodesk, IIRC, as well as sells them independently (Ansys Workbench.) Then you go into the flow modeling (liquid, gas) and thermal modeling (in everything) - those represent yet another unique problem. The equations that describe the model are pretty well known; the real challenge is to simplify the model enough so that the computation ends before you die from old age, and at the same time retains enough accuracy. Meshers are a popular, very complex problem, most FEA tools have several adaptive meshes, and a lot of effort goes into building them.

All that takes an awful amount of time and resources. Armadillo probably doesn't have enough expertise to code most of the hard stuff. Sure they can do GUI, but that's the easy part. They'd need probably a few decades, given their limited workforce, to recreate the existing software, and that would cost them a lot, and they'd be making no progress on the rocket, and they'd be getting no grants for any of that. Unless they want to enter the market of simulation tools, they'd be better off working on their main goals, and paying pocket change for access to missing knowledge and skills (in form of simulation software, or consultants, or whatever.)

Re:FreeCAD

[Progman3K]

Armadillo probably doesn't have enough expertise to code most of the hard stuff.

I disagree, they have one of the computer industry's best programmers, who has coded graphical things, yes, and undoubtedly physics simulation things. To a mind like that, a breakthrough in any of the needed algorithms is practically assured.

And anyway, they don't have to develop ALL of it, I'm just talking about how they could refine ONE thing and that could then be used to further others' work... Like how science normally works.

Re:FreeCAD

[jank1887]

Just to play the other side, as a mechanical engineer, I've done analysis in Comsol, Ansys, Fluent, and some custom Matlab.

Right now, I've been doing most of my analysis in Elmer (FOSS). If I was doing heavier stuff, I'd probably move to some version of Salome / Meca. These are all professional quality programs, but they're FOSS. The two are not necessarily exclusive. There are a set of libraries (OpenCascade) that has much of the framework needed to build interoperable Solid models, but nothing was out there for quite some time. FreeCAD is the one I keep hearing about, but haven't checked it out for quite some time. As such, I still Solidworks all my stuff.

Re:FreeCAD

[Baloo Uriza]

If you think real-world testing is optional for vehicles for anything less trivial than a bicycle, you're out of your mind.

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

Yes, both things are something that I wanted to mention but it was too late.

It does make sense for a company to *add* something to the existing package if they think it is a good idea. Modern CADs allow easy addition of 3rd party applications to the system, so that they have access to the models and can do things. There is a good number of 3rd party add-ons for SolidWorks, for example. Your suggestion of refining "one thing" is very valid.

Outside of that, I do not know if Armadillo programmers' gaming experience fits well into the needs of a FEA. In games you need an approximate answer; an error within 10% would be invisible to the user. But you need the answer very fast. Gaming engine's physics module satisfies those requirements; you may need only integer math to get close enough. But in FEA modeling errors accumulate and propagate; they can lead to failure to converge when by all indications it should. So it is a matter of considerable concern, managing accuracy, precision and the size of the data (it's usually huge already.) SMP is typically supported by all modelers; some, like CST, support clusters. This is yet another thing that games don't need to worry about.

Also, NASA has lots of code specifically written for spacecraft simulation, and I'm sure Armadillo can get access to that - for use or for improvements as needed (and it is badly needed in some cases, the code is old.)

Re:FreeCAD

[jpmorgan]

Of course real-world testing is necessary. But design is an iterative process. Without modern design tools, you may have to build and test orders of magnitude more prototypes before you get a working part.

Re:FreeCAD

[jpmorgan]

Are you fucking kidding me? I work in the industry that tftp describes and believe me... John Carmack is smart, but we are smarter. And we've been studying this stuff for a lot longer.

You really don't understand the enormous complexity, and the enormous progress already made, if you think one clever programmer is going to make any difference whatsoever.

Re:FreeCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

And you are suggesting to do stress and vibration analysis with that software? (none of the ones you list have any calculation quality beyond a fast and dirt check). Your really are a lousy mechanical engineer.

Re:FreeCAD

[mSparks43]

A lot of you seem really quite pessimistic, which is somewhat depressing tbh. How do you think these PHDs got their PHDs in the first place?
Via projects like openluna (which afait is a Uni spin out). So here you have a project, dedicated to bring the work of those PHDs into the public domain and all you can do is bitch about it?
Whats more, they are not just going to lauch some "man and women" on the moon, its a stepped program starting with robotics. This kind of project is the only way I can see of us ever breaking the (extremely lame) government monopoly on space flight.

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

And you are suggesting to do stress and vibration analysis with that software? (none of the ones you list have any calculation quality beyond a fast and dirt check).

I don't suggest anything, I tell you what I use. There is a difference. What I use is suitable for my projects, and I don't design flight hardware. If you do, please make your own choices.

If you are curious, last time I used FloTherm for thermal/airflow simulations, Ansys Workbench for stress/deformation, and NASTRAN for vibration. Those are pure FEA packages that the company has licenses for. I use Cosmos tools and the little stress module in Inventor mainly for quick-and-dirty checks. There are many tools out there, and the designer should know what to use and when.

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

A lot of you seem really quite pessimistic, which is somewhat depressing tbh.

That's because they seem to approach the problem as amateurs, in the worst meaning of the word. Here, in the brackets below, is the entire drawing that they need for first 300 pages of math and sketches:

[.]

They need only that much of detail to define the vehicle, select engines, determine weight limits, and so on. Once that dot "flies" in math, only then you might want to look at it closer.

If they work on robotics and such, a proper CAD is even more relevant because you can have parts made right after you designed the assembly, and you can put your robot together a week or two after that. No, this whole mess with "graphic artists" and F/OSS CAD is just a mess. Or at least the OP presented it as such. Maybe it's just a live demo of why only certain officers of a company, and not any random engineer who wants to, should talk to the press.

Re:FreeCAD

[Yvanhoe]

If there are funds and a strong ideology to not use proprietary code, one could also take an advanced FOSS project and code the missing features. Or start one from the scratch...

Another dumb question : NASA, ESA, and most public research facilities are quite friendly to open source and frequently develop their own (I know NASA provides a fluid mechanics analysis tool for instance). Did you check what they use for CAD ?

Re:FreeCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

All that takes an awful amount of time and resources. Armadillo probably doesn't have enough expertise to code most of the hard stuff. Sure they can do GUI, but that's the easy part.

When you say Armadillo lacks expertise to code most of the hard stuff, are you talking about Armadillo Aerospace? The Armadillo founded and led by John Carmack? John Carmack, programming god and Technical Director of iD Software? That Armadillo?

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/FAQ#John

Re:FreeCAD

[TheKidWho]

And you think Carmack is somehow more intelligent than the thousands of engineering/mathematics/science PhDs out there?

lol.

Re:FreeCAD

[Dirk Pitt]

A great deal of what NASA and, specifically, the research labs that support it, use are proprietary, internal-only packages. For classified work, they can't share data with 3rd party developers for bug fixing, so they reinvent the wheel in-house. Much of that may be derived from open source packages like Salome, but you'll probably never find that information publicly.

The commercial contractors will all use major MCAD packages like CATIA, NX, Nastran, etc.

Re:FreeCAD

[Agent0013]

Yeah, $20,000 might not be too much for a large company to spend on a Solidworks seat for an important project. But Solidworks likes to rape their customers. They have the ultimate upgrade treadmill. They make a new version every year. And once you open a drawing in the new version it saves it in that version, there is no going back or saving as an older version. At my company we work with customers who may not be on the latest version of Solidworks so the mechanical engineers have to have 3 or 4 versions of Solidworks installed on their computers and use the right one for each different project. Plus, that $20,000 is for one seat. Have more than one engineer, then the price multiplies very quickly.

I find it to be pretty buggy software also. It keeps loosing changes to drawings on the server. Some people open the drawing to see the latest version, while others get the previous version. It's a frackin' file server, it doesn't have multiple versions of the file, so Solidworks must be doing something fishy with the files, but it messes it up.

For $20,000 / year I would hope they fix it, but they haven't yet for the last three years that I have seen these problems.

I say just crack it and don't give them the money as they don't deserve it.

Re:FreeCAD

[HBoar]

Seeing as they are asking for a program to interact with artistic graphics software, it seems likely they wanting 3d models for promotional reasons. If they are wanting to attract investors, pages of calculations will be useless without accompanying pretty pictures (assuming that the investors are not engineers themselves, which seems a reasonable assumption).

Re:FreeCAD

[tftp]

I understand what you are saying, but I think investors into *this kind* of venture are smart enough to ask for the calculations before they will want to see pictures. Ask for the specific impulse and see crazies wither and disappear.

Besides, if they haven't calculated the weight, size and shape of their vehicle, may I ask what exactly they are going to render? Something they remember from Star Wars, or from cover pages of Amazing Stories?

The "render first, make later" approach works only when your product is technically simple, but is unique in its shape or form. Watches and cell phones are the prime example.

Several OSS CAD apps exist

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several CAD apps out there. It will eventually come down to trying them and personal preference.

Check them out at:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=cad

http://freshmeat.net/search?q=cad&submit=Search

Re:Several OSS CAD apps exist

[pclminion]

There are several CAD apps out there. It will eventually come down to trying them and personal preference.

Personal preference, huh? Interesting that you leave out the "Correct enough to design a piece of vehicular hardware that doesn't fucking explode halfway out of Earth's atmosphere" criterion. The idea of using software which is untested and unvetted for this purpose borders on criminal.

Re:Several OSS CAD apps exist

[Mr_Dyqik]

So there aren't any commercial packages that you could use either. I'm pretty sure all the CAD software licences I have read explicit disclaim their accuracy.

Re:Several OSS CAD apps exist

[da' WINS pimp]

Seven words - Parent Never Read a Software License

I left one as an exercise for the student.

re: FOSS CAD and 3D Modeling Software?

[rapu]

Everyone is going to be like "that's no moon" if you use open source graphics programs to plan your flight. But Gimp has a "sparks" brush for the stars.

Shame on you

[Anonymous Coward]

... for planning another moon hoax. We all know they didn't go to the moon but filmed it back in Nevada, and they did it all without any flimsy-schimzy 3d effects.

Re:Shame on you

[TheRaven64]

Nonsense. The moon landings were faked on a sound stage on Mars. Notice that all of the footage is black and white? That's so you can't tell that the dust is all red, not white, which would have rather spoilt the effect.

Re:Shame on you

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know the scoop on REM's "If you belive they put a man on the moon" lyric? Is that a denier?

Re:Shame on you

[Shatrat]

The song was about Andy Kaufman who was a denier, although probably only for comic effect.

Re:Shame on you

[guyminuslife]

I really don't understand the people who say the moon landing was fake. Of course it was real! Remember all that alien technology NASA got from Area 51?

Re:Shame on you

[Blakey Rat]

Andy Kaufman (the subject of the song) claimed/pretended to be a moon landing denier. I doubt he really was one, he whole comedy shtick was pissing people off, and denying the moon landing at that particular time in history pissed a lot of people off.

I could be wrong-- another part of his shtick was it being really, really hard to tell when he was joking or serious. Watch the "Man on the Moon" movie with Jim Carrey, it does a good job of examining Kaufman. (Although, other than the title of the movie, I don't think it has any material about the moon landing...)

Blender Imports Many Formats

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually do a lot of work with Blender, and it can import a wide variety of formats. I would be very surprised it the CAD programs you are using don't export to at least ONE of the various formats Blender can accept. If you are using AutoCAD I think you have a good shot of an export to a ,dxf or .dwg are probably your best bets.

gnu moon mission

[mdemonic]

Put a Stallman on the moon, Im shure you will get funding

Re:gnu moon mission

[Anonymous Coward]

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, though every place or time is a good for (r)evolution, whether it takes catapulting rocky nukes on earth or deflecting lawyers...

captcha: squats

Re:gnu moon mission

[deniable]

Put Balmer there and you'll get way more funding.

Re:gnu moon mission

[Anonymous Coward]

They equally suck, just in different ways.

You're sure to get millions either way!

Re:gnu moon mission

[arielCo]

Send both and charge big $$ for the tickets to the fight. There's your business model!

Re:gnu moon mission

[AstrumPreliator]

Yeah, but then they'd never get a woman on the moon!

Re:gnu moon mission

[Anonymous Coward]

A slightly more hairy monkey has already been in orbit.

Re:gnu moon mission

[inKubus]

Yeah, but then they'd never get a woman on the moon!

Human woman, perhaps, but a female wookie....woooooonnnngngngngngng!

Re:gnu moon mission

[HeckRuler]

Admit it, you're just trying to setup the plot from "the moon is a hard mistress" aren't you?
A massive AI built up by the first colonists.
Gender imbalance.
How about we starts farms there as well? Ship it back with a massive rail fun?

Re:gnu moon mission

[Mycroft_VIII]

There where no nuclear weapons involved. That's a misconception caused by persons who do not understand the magnitude of the kinetic energy released by metal containers filled with rocks falling through a gravity well.
      Add in the fact most people do not seem to understand that 'mushroom clouds' are a result of the magnitude of energy release and not any inherent nuclear process and you get OMG NUKLAR WEAPONS as a result.

Mycroft

sounds like a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a scam. At least these people, both the OP and the people they're trying to convince to give them money, haven't thought through the entire ordeal.

Re:sounds like a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that, they dont seems to have much plans yet. just a website!

Is that so...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon"

No you're not.

Re:Is that so...

[samkass]

Especially not if you're putting additional constraints on your operation such as requiring every tool to be open source. It's hard enough when you're using the best tools.

Re:Is that so...

[Blakey Rat]

Hey! Hope springs eternal!!

With any luck, they won't get close enough to a working rocket to actually kill anybody, though-- I think that's about the best you can hope for. Then it would turn tragic. (Right now it's just hilarious. To me, at least.)

Re:Is that so...

[selven]

This project is, success or failure, going to be operating on a $1 million budget, probably even less. Commercial software prices for these applications are intended for billion dollar enterprises. Given that, open source tools probably are the best tools for the job.

Re:Is that so...

[Anonymous Coward]

A million dollars won't buy you a small jet, let alone a damned moon rocket. Think, McFly.

Re:Is that so...

[Anonymous Coward]

CAD is dead it is all 3D modelling now with linked finite element analysis. No respectable engineering school teaches anymore.
I you want some FOSS in your software in the package try Solid Edge from Siemens it uses some FOSS internally

Re:Is that so...

[Clemsonuee]

SolidWorks is intended for companies a lot smaller than billion dollar enterprises. My company does under 10M a year and we own 5 SolidWorks seats.

Re:Is that so...

[Arbition]

How may community space projects are there? For something as big as space exploration, they can't afford to have lots of different organisations simply because of minor differences in principals. There seems to be spacehack.org (which isn't so much about launch as just bringing people together), which links to cstart.org. Also, as linked in another post (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531702&cid=30975480), copenhagensuborbitals.com. I'm sure some digging around will pull up some more.

Re:Is that so...

[nazsco]

> It's hard enough when you're using the best tools.

Riiiight. because NASA only did it on the 60's(?) with the aid of solidworks pro extraCAD ultra VI with lots of expensive plugins.

OSS is just a way for people that actually can do the math/designs collaborate without any pirated software.

Re:Is that so...

[sumdumass]

But what NASA did in the 60's isn't considered safe in today's terms. In fact, what is considered safe in today's terms is derived from a lot of the failures of NASA in the past. It's also part of the reasons why NASA is having such difficulty going back to the moon today.

Although I do agree with your sentiment on collaborating without any pirated software. Maybe this is just a call to the OSS community to step up once again. They have filled various needs in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Re:Is that so...

[Paul server guy]

Hey! Hope springs eternal!!

With any luck, they won't get close enough to a working rocket to actually kill anybody,

Well, actually, we have flying hardware, and several working professionals on the team, so Yes we have hope, and we will have some victory as well.

Re:Is that so...

[jedibfa]

I know of three others (not mentioned on Open Luna's site):
* DevelopSpace, founded by Paul Wooster - http://wiki.developspace.net/Main_Page
* Open Aerospace, founded by Ralph Ewig - https://www.open-aerospace.org/tiki-index.php
* Mach 30: Foundation for Space Development, founded by J. Simmons (me) - http://mach30.org/

Re:Is that so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, there are opening additional funding options by making sure the crew is appropriately diverse, depending of the sexual orientations of the involved.

Re:Is that so...

[TheDarkMaster]

I agree. When you go into the unknown, you need the best tools available. Whether open source or not


P.S: Interestingly, Google translator is getting better to translate the Brazilian Portuguese.

Re:Is that so...

[Blakey Rat]

Well, actually, we have flying hardware,

Lemme guess, your biggest contractor is Estes? That's about all you can afford on that impressive $130 budget you've managed to raise.

and several working professionals on the team,

Professional whats? Chefs? Garbagemen?

so Yes we have hope, and we will have some victory as well.

Hey, knock yourself out. Just don't kill anybody and we're cool.

Re:Is that so...

[TheKidWho]

Uhh, what do you think CAD stands for?

Let me give you a hint: Computer Aided Design...

art people

[rschwa]

Why does it seem to me that if I were planning a trip to the moon, I wouldn't really have 'art people'?

Re:art people

[Dr. Evil]

Unless you're not *really* sending a person to the moon, you're just faking a lunar landing :-)

Re:art people

[Blakey Rat]

I think the theory is to create spectacular-looking images to attract investors. Either that, or they're only faking a moon landing...

Re:art people

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this is article is an IQ test. Anyone who replies with a serious suggestion or question gets put on some sort of mailing list to be sold to the likes of First Madoff Securities, Tahoe Finest Real Estate, The Pennsylvania Mint, etc.

Re:art people

[Scrameustache]

Why does it seem to me that if I were planning a trip to the moon, I wouldn't really have 'art people'?

Why don't you ask Mr. Von Braun and Mr. Disney?

Re:art people

[Paul server guy]

I think the theory is to create spectacular-looking images to attract investors. Either that, or they're only faking a moon landing...

Well, Funny you should say that...

Actually, yes, we are wanting the Artists to create great donor/investment material, followed with good tools to keep the general public interested and educated.

And as far as faking it? Well no, what we are instead looking for ways to prove that we actually did it... (I know, feeding the trolls.)

Re:art people

[imakemusic]

Because you haven't considered the fact that you'll need money to get there. And people with money can be swayed by sufficiently shiny artwork.

Re:art people

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're not *really* sending a person to the moon, you're just faking a lunar landing :-)

Your cynicism has stunned me out of a comment overload torpor. I would like to subscribe to your catalog.

BRL-CAD

[yahooy2uy]

Sure, it looks like he's plugging his website, but is it really necessary to point that out? I think we all can read. Maybe instead of boosting your own ego by putting him down, you could actually do something constructive in the minute it took you to reply to his post. In terms of free CAD software, BRL-CAD is probably the closest to what you're looking for, but I've always found it tiresome to use. It was developed by the Army for their computer modeling needs in the late 70s. It's still a fairly active project as well.

OSS CAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right? OSS CAD software is very amateurish and useless for any serious design purposes.

Drop your ideology and purchase some professionally developed proprietary software.

Re:OSS CAD?

[illumastorm]

Is that you Steve Ballmer?

Re:OSS CAD?

[bensode]

no probably Carl Bass

Re:OSS CAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you Steve Ballmer?

That's not funny. I'm in accounting and I have similar things to say about FOSS accounting packages.

Believe me, I'm on a constant lookout and I seriously doubt you or anyone else here can point me to one that I (and my peers) haven't looked at and rejected already.

Re:OSS CAD?

[selven]

Their website can't even handle a slashdotting. This is probably a hobbyist rocket type project, not a giant commercial enterprise. The only way they can afford professionally designed software is by pirating it.

Re:OSS CAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

the classic reply to this question is that you need to adjust your attitude:

"it will be ready when it's done. sooner if you help."

the point being is that you should not expect to show up and get Free Beer. If you and your friends bring the frisbee and some good weather, chances are very good that the Free Beer will arrive. but no one owes you anything so stop expecting to get something for nothing.

you want viable accounting software? contribute a couple hours a week to the closest-to-ready FOSS one you can find, even if it is just spell checking the documentation and reporting wishes. don't expect anyone else to change the world for you, stop complaining and help make the tools you need yourself. chances are in the process the time spent in the trenches will gain you a much better insight into the fundamental nature of your craft.

Re:OSS CAD?

[i.r.id10t]

Or spend that $$ improving and fixing one of hte F/OSS ones...

Re:OSS CAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny enough he is probably like most people and has a job that pays him to do this accounting stuff. They don't pay him to write FOSS software. When he is off work, he probably likes to spend his time with his kids, helping them with homework, taking them to music lessons, coaching their soccer teams and the like. Why would he want to carve out time to work on some FOSS project?

Re:OSS CAD?

[Oligonicella]

That may be the classic reply, but the more standard response is "Check the dead projects file."

"contribute a couple hours a week ..."

It is more time and cost effective for an accountant to purchase a professional package.

"chances are in the process the time spent in the trenches will gain you a much better insight into the fundamental nature of your craft."

He would gain insights into the fundamental nature of accountancy by contributing a couple of hours of slack labor a week? Explain please.

Re:OSS CAD?

[robot256]

Then I guess they better pirate a professionally designed rocket too.

Re:OSS CAD?

[dbIII]

You're kidding, right? OSS CAD software is very amateurish and useless for any serious design purposes.

That is of course exactly what we used to say about AutoCAD when it was all a small company or poorly funded engineering school could afford. Effort over time makes things useful for serious design purposes. There may be something out there that fits the bill.

Re:OSS CAD?

[TheKidWho]

AutoCAD is still an extremely low end package in today's CAD environment.

Re:OSS CAD?

[dbIII]

Something low end with constructive solid geometry is probably all they need for their concept drawings.

Re:OSS CAD?

[TheKidWho]

Don't get me wrong, Inventor is a pretty decent software package. We used it for quite a while in our SAE Baja team and I believe they are still using it, mostly due to a reluctance to move to UGS NX. However it IS a lowend package compared to some more capable software like UGS NX or CATIA.

One of the largest benefits of working in a software like NX for example is being able to move ideas from the Design to Engineering to Manufacturing phases all in one software package.

Re:OSS CAD?

[Reservoir Penguin]

If Linus had the same attitude and went partying after classes like 'normal' students we would have never had Linux. Volunteering and altruism is a need and a quality of character that people either have or have not.

Re:OSS CAD?

[jonaskoelker]

Drop your ideology and purchase some professionally developed proprietary software.

That wouldn't help OpenLuna fulfil their mission; in fact, it would be completely counter to it:

The OpenLuna Foundation seeks to return mankind to the lunar surface, first through robotic missions, followed by manned exploration, culminating in an eight person permanent outpost, and to do all of this in a way that it is accessible to everyone. Our research and technology will be open-source, we are privately funded, and one of our specific goals is to reach out to the community and educational systems to spread interest, enthusiasm, and involvement.

The point isn't just getting to the moon again. With that in mind, I don't think they will take your advice.

Re:OSS CAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why would he want to carve out time to work on some FOSS project?

1.) maybe his current job sucks, and doesn't let him work creatively (no 'creative accounting' jokes, please...)
2.) maybe he has ideas how his software could be better, but has no control over it because it's proprietary
3.) maybe he wants to help other people in his position, it's not unheard of to be altruistic
4.) uh, shut up! :)

Did anyone grab a snapshot of the site?

[ATestR]

By the time I clicked the link, it was already slashdotted. If not, I'll have to check it out tomorrow (or not at all).

Sure you are

[quantaman]

You're going to put a man on the moon.

With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).

And your server, which you posted to /., can't even handle the /. effect!!

I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.

Re:Sure you are

[Paul server guy]

You're going to put a man on the moon.

With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).

And your server, which you posted to /., can't even handle the /. effect!!

I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.

Ok, Sure, Why don't you volunteer and write that wikipedia page for us. That's what Community involvement is about. and, With that kind of community involvement, we'll get some people to take care of the servers, and well, even, eventually get to the moon. It all has to start somewhere!

Re:Sure you are

[quantaman]

You're going to put a man on the moon.

With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).

And your server, which you posted to /., can't even handle the /. effect!!

I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.

Ok, Sure, Why don't you volunteer and write that wikipedia page for us. That's what Community involvement is about. and, With that kind of community involvement, we'll get some people to take care of the servers, and well, even, eventually get to the moon. It all has to start somewhere!

How do I write the wikipedia page, I know nothing about your group other than the fact that you have unrealistic goals and your server is down.

As for a community I've run an open source project, and I know at the core you need some very dedicated people to do a lot of the heavy lifting. And for a hardware project where there are significant costs and geographic requirements that heavy lifting becomes a lot heavier. You don't just say "I'm going to do X" and a big group assembles and does most of X, you do a bunch of X and people show up when you have significant success. To do that for a moon shot you're going to need an initial group that's talented enough and financed enough to actually build some kind of test rocket that shows you're serious before you even start to build a real community.

Is this development model even tested? I know of no highly successful open source style hardware projects, if you can find a way to make your development model work with a car or laptop people might start taking you seriously. But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.

I know I sound very discouraging, and I'm trying to be. I've wasted my time on unrealistic projects before and I wish I had the common sense to bail earlier, even volunteer man-hours aren't free.

I know you're just asking for CAD advice and I hope you get some. But my advice is look at this with an outsiders perspective and seriously ask yourself if your plans are feasible.

Re:Sure you are

[LordAndrewSama]

You're getting a lot of shit on /. so let me just say "good luck" and I hope you get there and moon all the dissenters ;)

Can't be much help as I know nothing of CAD though..

Re:Sure you are

[da' WINS pimp]

Ok, I'm gonna feed the Troll on this one...

>But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never >effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.

I thought that was just what Russia and the US did in the 50's and 60's. Granted they had the budgets of their whole countries to wager on it, but that doesn't hold water as an argument either for many reasons. I'll propose one - it may be hard, but not so fantastic to think that a project like this could be done in 2010 for a couple of orders of magnitude less dollars than in 1960. If it can't then maybe we haven't learned anything from history and we are all doomed. I hope not. I could say something about "shoulders of giants" now but I think that was already somewhere on the openluna.org website.

I'm sorry you are so jaded by your open source volunteer work that you have lost all ability to dream big. Go back to your cube now and do whatever it is you do. Let the dreamers dream big, you sir are apparently not suited to it.

Re:Sure you are

[quantaman]

Ok, I'm gonna feed the Troll on this one...

>But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never >effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.

I thought that was just what Russia and the US did in the 50's and 60's. Granted they had the budgets of their whole countries to wager on it, but that doesn't hold water as an argument either for many reasons. I'll propose one - it may be hard, but not so fantastic to think that a project like this could be done in 2010 for a couple of orders of magnitude less dollars than in 1960.

If a couple other efforts had gotten there I may agree, but the USSR never made it, China hasn't make it, India hasn't made it. A faster processor isn't going to get you to the moon, you still need a lot of fuel and a lot of hardware.

I'm sorry you are so jaded by your open source volunteer work that you have lost all ability to dream big. Go back to your cube now and do whatever it is you do. Let the dreamers dream big, you sir are apparently not suited to it.

I'm not jaded, I'm very optimistic about open source and communities as a development model. But I'm also realistic enough to know that open source isn't a magic wand, you need conditions to make it work and I don't see those present.

Now that the site is up I do see they have some actual University and Industry partners, and if those groups are willing to devote significant manpower and resources than yes, they may have a shot (at least at landing robots on the moon).

But they're also trying to raise $7500 in donations. I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.

I hope they prove me wrong, if this effort succeeded that would be unbelievably awesome on multiple fronts. But hope alone isn't sufficient, and I just don't think it will work.

Re:Sure you are

[Paul server guy]

Thank you. (And we/I plan to.)

As far as not being much help, If you read /., I bet there's something you can do that we need. ;)

Re:Sure you are

[da' WINS pimp]

Well stated. I'm gonna continue with a couple of points and apologize for calling troll since you put some thought on this response.

>A faster processor isn't going to get you to the moon, you still need a lot of fuel and a lot of hardware.

Yes, there is work to be done, and money to raise, but this group is not afraid of that. Those faster processors don't appear overnight, and this may take as long or longer than to go from 8088 to x64, or from Linus in his basement to Ubuntu. It may not work at all, but we may just learn something about how to do it on the journey. That knowledge or the quest for it may inspire someone who can figure it out down the road.

>But I'm also realistic enough to know that open source isn't a magic wand

I have to say it has become a marketing buzzword. I think a good few of us saw that coming. It sux when a paradigm shift gets co-opted by the marketers.

>I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.

I know they would like more than $7.5k, but you have to start somewhere. That amount will get you some bandwidth and hardware that can survive the /. effect or render a decent animation.

>I hope they prove me wrong, if this effort succeeded that would be unbelievably awesome on multiple fronts.

Me too, on that we can agree. I'm glad you aren't that jaded after all.

BTW, in case you haven't figured it out I know these guys and they are the type that are worth a flame war at least. On this Paul just wanted some CAD and since its not strictly his area he went with what he knew. There were some good responses in there that may at least help him balance the engineering side vs. the art/marketing.

Re:Sure you are

[quantaman]

Well stated. I'm gonna continue with a couple of points and apologize for calling troll since you put some thought on this response.

No worries, rapidly escalating, and de-escalating, arguments is a /. tradition.

I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.

I know they would like more than $7.5k, but you have to start somewhere. That amount will get you some bandwidth and hardware that can survive the /. effect or render a decent animation.

I think you could probably use an open source development model to design a pretty decent spaceship. That's not that different than designing an OS, though the dynamics are a little different since people can't really use a set of schematics the way they can use a program so I don't know if they'll be as motivated.

But actually building the hardware requires serious capital. I honestly wouldn't even try to raise the $7500, it's like someone announcing you're going to open a restaurant, then asking to borrow $2 to buy a cup of coffee. It just doesn't inspire confidence.

SpaceShipOne cost $25 million, the only open source(ish) project I can think of that raises nearly that much money is Wikipedia, and even they're probably a bit short. If they're going to have a shot they need some serious corporate sponsors who are willing to give them what they need in the way of funding and building space in exchange for advertising. Or a billionaire passionate about the project. And for either of those they'll need a lot of publicity and some good evidence that its going to succeed. And they should probably solicit the businesses and billionaires individually since they generally don't surf the web and think "Hmm, I'd like to donate several million dollars there"

They have some partners already, they should be looking there for the $7500 and the rack space, then get someone on board with serious capital backing who tells people that its a serious effort and they should come to help design a spaceship.

HeeksCad

[bored_engineer]

HeeksCad is making progress. I don't know about feeding your parts into Blender, though. You may be able to shape the project some if you get involved, though. Somebody else mentioned FreeCAD. I've not yet tried to use it.

There's also gcad3d. I found that one to be tough to use, though. For 2D, I don't think that you have many options but qcad.

That didn't take long...

[kevin_j_morse]

... for the website to be slashdotted. I think his attempt at getting traffic worked a little to well.

Re:That didn't take long...

[Paul server guy]

It didn't even occur to me that would happen, and If I'd have thought so, I wouldn't even have posted the link. I just wanted some good CAD software. We'll buy it if we have to, but we wanted to keep to our philosophy if we could.

Huh? Blender?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being able to import CAD files into Blender should be the least of your concerns when choosing a CAD package. There isn't a free CAD package out there that will cope with designing a rocket and lunar lander. Spend your hard earned $130 (plus a lot more) on a high-end CAD package like Catia or Unigraphics.

Re:Huh? Blender?

[CompMD]

I've done aerospace engineering for one of the premier aerospace design houses in the US, and anything going to production was done in Unigraphics/NX. At Cessna, everything was done in CATIA. Either of those programs are what you need. As easy to use and handy as SolidWorks is, I think it is better suited for widgets and small assemblies, not something as complex as an aircraft or space vehicle. You're likely to blow yourselves up with anything less than UG or CATIA. If you care about pretty pictures, both UG and CATIA have rendering packages.

Use the right tool for the job, even though in this case the right tool is going to be about $100,000 for a single perpetual floating license.

It could be how you're using it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the engineers have tried working with Blender...

Is it plugged in?

BTW, what kind of drinks are you making that'll send one to the Moon? It sounds like it has Tequila or at last vodka.

Good CAD Sofware Is Hard

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it will be a long time before there are competitive open source CAD tools. BRL-CAD uses constructive solid geometry which is so horribly primitive that I never even bothered to download it. Blender is not a CAD tool. Thanks for the link to FreeCAD though. I'll be checking that out right now.

Regards,
Jason

Use a probe

[quantumpineal]

Put a remote controlled or autonomous probe up there first. And try land near that weird castle thing on the dark side :P

BRL-CAD

[RedLeg]

A Couple of others have already mentioned it, but take a look at BRL-CAD.

It's pretty much the standard. It originated as a US Government backed project and was later open sourced. This is a VERY mature piece of software, unfortunately with a steep learning curve.

Red

some earlier discussions

[Trepidity]

In addition to the comments here, you might find useful suggestions in this 2005 and this 2003 Slashdot discussion.

Find A Mirror!

[ddillman]

Slashdotted already...

Got your priorities straight I see.

[sunking2]

They key to every massive engineering effort is making sure you can do your model fly throughs form your cad drawings. You'd be sunk without them.

lol

[mnemonic_]

Is this a joke? Your team page shows you have at most four engineers, who are mostly IT geeks, not experts in propulsion, aerospace structures or astrodynamics, with the possible exception of Dr Snyder. You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote. You guys make Armadillo Aerospace look like Lockheed Martin. At least SpaceX etc. while lacking other things, started with something (usually money), you guys don't have anything. Quit wasting your time.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you see their mission list? 1: land multiple rovers, 5:land up to 5 astronauts, 6:Establish a moon base. Easy as pie!

Re:lol

[Homburg]

You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote.

Well, that makes sense to me. You need the artist to produce the concept materials to get people to invest the money so that you can employ an engineering team and produce something solid.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you want about these jokers, but Armadillo Aerospace is nothing to be making fun of.
Carmack fanboyism aside, considering the time that they've been around, and the budget they have, they're doing great work.

Re:lol

[Paul server guy]

Actually, we have a large number more than that. That page is just the team leaders. Stop wining and come help.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

naah you are welcome to keep wasting your time, but please dont post this crap to /. to waste ours

Re:lol

[Geminii]

You need a spellcheck guy.

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

But this cabernet is just so good!

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Paul server guy? Your page got slashdotted and you call yourself a server guy, how or why should anyone take you seriously?

Re:lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop wining and come help.

Yeah, stop winning, it's making them look bad.

Bwhahahaha - "engineers" drawing pretty parts

[iggymanz]

oh man, what a load - if you had real engineers working on actual moon project you'd be more worried about nonlinear FEA software at this point. There's a reason why the USA is the only nation to ever had put humans on the moon - it's way too complex, way too expensive, and requires way too many PhD level man-decade equivalents of effort.

Re:Bwhahahaha - "engineers" drawing pretty parts

[Tomfrh]

you'd be more worried about nonlinear FEA software at this point

They can do their rainbow plots in CAD.

Select colour red -> Flood fill.

Re:Bwhahahaha - "engineers" drawing pretty parts

[LordAzuzu]

<quote><p>(...)There's a reason why the USA is the only nation to ever had put humans on the moon(...)</p></quote>
(Color) Pics of it never happened.

Re:Bwhahahaha - "engineers" drawing pretty parts

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that they even mention Blender in an engineering context should tell you something...

Re:Bwhahahaha - "engineers" drawing pretty parts

[Anonymous Coward]

...and because it's totally pointless. Wonder when the USA are going to finally admit they lost the space race? The Russians got into space first, got to the dark side of the moon first, and landed on the moon first.

The Americans don't want to admit unmanned space flight is future, because then they'd have to admit that the Soviets won the space race.

Engineers who don't know what tools to use?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing your project has a dim future.

Several problems

[Telvin_3d]

Doesn't work, and I speak from experience. I have done work for the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) doing similar things and what you are looking for doesn't exist on all sorts of levels.

First, engineering software is a very specialized beast in exactly the wrong way to exist as a FOSS project. For FOSS projects to exist you first need someone who is capable of doing the programing. Then they have to have a need that they want to fulfill. And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense. None of this describes the type of people who are trying to design next-generation parts of anything.

It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?

It's the same reason that film and television production has always been happy to pick up FOSS solutions that already work but have never particularly cared about developing them. If you are operating at the professional level where you need these tools the cost of them is almost meaningless. It something that always confuses GIMP and Blender supporters who view it as personal software. For them shelling out $5000 a pop for software is such a big deal and they can never understand how the pros don't seem to care.

If you are seriously attempting to design aerospace hardware then you have moved into the realm where these types of software costs are basically meaningless. Suck it up and act like it. If, however, you are actually trying to become a proof-of-concept for FOSS in engineering work then I wish you the best of luck. However, those are two different goals and likely not compatible.

However, beyond the FOSS issue what you are trying to do will not work. Period. These types of software packages are very specialized for specific types of work and beyond a basic level are no good beyond that. 3D modeling software such as Blender or AoI (or Maya or Lightwave or 3DS Max...) are not CAD software. They are not even remotely CAD software. Yes, they appear superficially similar but they are NOT. 3D modeling software is intended to fake the appearance of large numbers of real objects. CAD software is intended to do what is basically visual math. 3D modeling packages have margins of error built in. Many of them will auto-round any equations or numbers entered. As such they are not suitable for real-world design of any complexity.

The types of data that CAD and modeling software generate are also not particularly similar. If you try and just toss engineering blueprints into animation software your artists will not thank you are the end result will look like ass. CAD tends to have too much and the wrong type of detail where animation software is looking for simplification and tends to simplify areas that need detail to look proper once animated. It takes almost more work to clean up a CAD model for animation that it takes to create one from scratch.

You can't really even send a CAD design right to a 3D printer without a significant amount of clean-up unless it was designed with that in mind.

So, to summarize, decide what you want each section of your operation to do and shell out the cash for whatever it takes to let them do it properly. Let everyone worry about their own needs and don't try and meddle by forcing the internal needs of other departments on them. If you were seriously planning on saving costs by not buying professional software for an AEROSPACE project then you are already fucked. You may as well blow all the investor's money on a massive party because it's lost anyways.

Re:Several problems

[Jane Q. Public]

There is one part that you are definitely wrong about:

"And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense."

That may be true in some few cases, but far from all. Java is one very good counterexample. And while Linux started out that way, it didn't end up that way at all. There are many, many counterexamples to your assertion.

And if that isn't true, then "It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?" isn't true, either.

"then you have moved into the realm where these types of software costs are basically meaningless" -- almost all of your arguments seem to assume that cost is the primary consideration... but that isn't necessarily the case.

Re:Several problems

[LetterRip]

First, engineering software is a very specialized beast in exactly the wrong way to exist as a FOSS project. For FOSS projects to exist you first need someone who is capable of doing the programing. Then they have to have a need that they want to fulfill. And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense. None of this describes the type of people who are trying to design next-generation parts of anything.

That describes some, but not all FOSS tools. In CAD and FEA tools there are government and research facility sponsored tools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_finite_element_software_packages

It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?

The exact same thing was said for feature film animation. The first feature film done almost entirely with Blender premieres in a month http://www.blendernation.com/plumiferos-to-premiere-on-februari-18th/

It isn't to the same quality as Avatar or a typical Pixar film, however Blender was to a productive quality and production speed to get the job done.

It's the same reason that film and television production has always been happy to pick up FOSS solutions that already work but have never particularly cared about developing them. If you are operating at the professional level where you need these tools the cost of them is almost meaningless. It something that always confuses GIMP and Blender supporters who view it as personal software. For them shelling out $5000 a pop for software is such a big deal and they can never understand how the pros don't seem to care.

Actually the reason is more due to a established pipeline, the majority of the available workforce is already trained in the existing tools, and until recently the productivity of the tools was not competitive, among other issues. You should see a dramitic shift to Blender usage over the next 10 years, since it is becoming in widespread usage in universities.

[quote]However, beyond the FOSS issue what you are trying to do will not work. Period. These types of software packages are very specialized for specific types of work and beyond a basic level are no good beyond that. 3D modeling software such as Blender or AoI (or Maya or Lightwave or 3DS Max...) are not CAD software. They are not even remotely CAD software. Yes, they appear superficially similar but they are NOT. 3D modeling software is intended to fake the appearance of large numbers of real objects. CAD software is intended to do what is basically visual math. 3D modeling packages have margins of error built in. Many of them will auto-round any equations or numbers entered. As such they are not suitable for real-world design of any complexity.[/quote]

Precision is definitely an issue when comparing a 3D Animation package to CAD. That said, precision is actually a fairly solvable problem. And as long as the work is not done in drastically different scales in the same file adequate accuracy can be maintained.

That said it is far from clear from his description what they are trying to do. Ie I'd assume that they are not going to be outputting this to a 3D printer etc.

The types of data that CAD and modeling software generate are also not particularly similar. If you try and just toss engineering blueprints into animation software your artists will not thank you are the end result will look like ass. CAD tends to have too much and the wrong type of detail where animation software is looking for simplification and tends to simplify areas that need detail to look proper

Re:Several problems

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to have sci-fi looking stuff to convince 90 year old billionaires to part with the money - and it has to look like you're serious. How do you think the CSA and NASA got started?

Re:Several problems

[alexschmidt]

Thank you! I keep telling people: When it comes to business DON'T F*CK AROUND! Get the RIGHT advice and the the tools from the pro's. If you do anything else, it will just look home made and no one will take you seriously.

Re:Several problems

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were seriously planning on saving costs by not buying professional software for an AEROSPACE project then you are already fucked. You may as well blow all the investor's money on a massive party because it's lost anyways.

They are looking for an easy way to make snazzy animations, so that they can attract more investors during the massive party.

Re:Several problems

[westlake]

And while Linux started out that way, it didn't end up that way at all. There are many, many counterexamples to your assertion.

If your privately funded aerospace project is to have any credibility at all it must be seen visibly moving towards its goal. You can't afford to be sidelined for a decade while your FOSS engineering software plays catch-up.

Re:Several problems

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to ask about CAD systems and you're using blender you probably have never met an engineer. You should find one!

Re:Several problems

[Jane Q. Public]

Sure but that's only one example. There are many others. Again, Java is not a bad example. Yes, there was a bit of time from inception until its general acceptance... but most of that time it wasn't even known to most people. Once it was widely known, it became a big name very rapidly.

Re:Several problems

[Oligonicella]

Yeah, but unfortunately for your argument, FOSS engineering software catch-up is *exactly* the linch-pin that this particular foray depends from. They're not looking to develop CAD software, they're looking to develop rockets. FOSS is only good for those who want to develop something while it's underway. It's only good for everyone else after it works and has sufficient functionality. Life - it's a bitch.

Re:Several problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Free FEA that is adequate IS available it's called code-aster (http://www.code-aster.org/V2/spip.php?rubrique2 )
There are excellent data visualisation tools available for free as well like Paraview (http://www.paraview.org/)
However on the 3D CAD front - forget it. It doesn't exist.
The cheapest usable mechanical 3D cad is probably Alibre but it's nowhere near adequate for any kind of aerospace project - NX4, Catia or maybe a couple of others are your choices for a project of that kind. I would love to be able to use a GPL CAD system instead of Pro/E but everything I have seen is not to put too fine a point on it - junk.
The mid-range won't cut it on a project that size either, to intergrate dozens of people on a CAD model, have it accurate, robust, user tolerant and not have people tripping over each other is a major headache. (BRL-CAD??? I've seen it -I hope you're fucking kidding)
There is some promise in architectural 3d Cad (Octree) but for mechanical or aerospace stuff forget it.

Cheers

Stephen

Re:Several problems

[Knacklappen]

Dude, you are not an engineer, it screams from your reply (I wouldn't call it an "answer"). Go, learn som 3D solid modelling package (Pro/E, CATIA, UniGraphics NG, SolidWorks, SolidEdge etc) and then come back, read your reply again and be ashamed.

Re:Several problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a personal problem. Maybe the issue is you've got more money than talent?

Not everyone has to delegate as often as you. Different strokes and all that.

Re:Several problems

[Jane Q. Public]

"FOSS is only good for those who want to develop something while it's underway."

?? This comment puzzles me. Java is FOSS. You are saying that Java is only good for those who wanted to develop while it was being developed?? I really don't understand what you are trying to say here. I am maybe over-using the example of Java (Ruby is another good one) but serious engineering projects -- VERY serious, including military -- have depended on Jave for well over 10 years, even as it was being developed.

Am I completely misunderstanding what you are trying to say, or are you just wrong?

Re:Several problems

[ALoopingIcon]

I do not completely agree with the above post. While it is true that there are fields where the cost of the sw is not a real issue it is also true that some of these software niches are filled by FOSS tools. For example in 3D printing/rapid prototyping one of the best tools around for cleaning up models is an open source tool, called MeshLab ( http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ ) .

Re:Several problems

[david_thornley]

Java is not a bad example? It wasn't actually F/OSS until recently, and I'm not sure the process has been completed. Originally it was something you got free from Sun, which isn't the same thing.

Re:Several problems

[Jane Q. Public]

That is not true. Java has been open-source for many years. The core of it was still "owned" by Sun, but it was Open Source nevertheless.

The two are not completely incompatible. Java was free, and it was open source, but it was not under a GPL or MIT or such license.

site is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

" privately funded, open source, manned" ...you may now add "slashdotted"

Re:site is dead

[Paul server guy]

Yup, That's kinda cool.

If I were an astronaut...

[Exitar]

I'd be quite scared to be launched on the Moon by a company that asked suggestions about the tools to use on Slashdot!

Re:If I were an astronaut...

[Tyerin]

Open source everything eh? Even this shuttle? Hmm..that's odd...the left booster light came on and the life support one...said something about a segfault?! Okay okay, we need to contact the guy who developed this portion of the software. What, he can't come to the phone?! What do you mean he's ten years old and it's past his be time?! *poof*

Please, please do not donate to this project

[raftpeople]

Instead, I would direct you to our privately funded project to get to Mars! We are just bringing it all together at this point, can't give you actual numbers of dollars raised, and our website isn't up yet, but man it's going to be awesome!

Re:Please, please do not donate to this project

[Paul server guy]

Re:Please, please do not donate to this project

You sir, are an ass.

Re:Please, please do not donate to this project

[TheKidWho]

He has a point, might as well donate the money to charity.

Re:Please, please do not donate to this project

[Rogerborg]

And you, sir, are giving a rather poor impression of your attitude, and by implication, the likely success of your project.

Leaders lead by inspiring. They don't moan at strangers for not fawning over them. The onus is on you to show that your project is more than a risible waste of money and effort. Do you have a plan for doing that, or would you rather spend your time bitching at people for showing healthy skepticism?

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did the chicken go to the moon?

pen + paper works

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the engineers have tried working with Blender and Art of Illusion

I hope this is some kind of joke. You're going to end up killing someone!

They want to just draw the parts,

Then why don't they just grab a pen and some paper and draw the parts. Since I assume you're trying to _build_ the parts - not just draw them - you'll find that most fabricators would rather have a well documented set of hand-drawn diagrams than some data for a CAD system they probably don't use.

Re:pen + paper works

[maxwell demon]

They tried, but they couldn't find an open sourced pen ...

Re:pen + paper works

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they should carve the designs in a piece of wood?

There's a price going open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the graphics and CAD software that are open source just don't stack up. It's like Blender. Why is anyone still using the pro packages given what Blender can do for free? Ever tried to use Blender? It'll have you run screaming for Maya before the day is out. Most open source graphics software is more about what the programmers want than the end users. There's some amazing open source software like Open Office, I'd pay for it quicker than Microsoft Office. Gimp is perfectly usable so long as you aren't doing high end graphics for publishing. Blender represents the clunky end of open source for me. If you're honestly trying to do designs that some day may be built I'd find a way to get pro software like Solid Works. Converting models for graphic is a pain but I have done it before. At least you can output files ready for CNC mills or rapid prototyping. It even does a nice job of rendering for graphics and it's easier to use than Blender for rendering. I know we're supposed to be pro open source but there are times when there simply aren't options that make sense. Most high end CAD softwares have roots going back 20 years or more. Open source still needs to catch up.

Re:There's a price going open source

[Ash-Fox]

Why is anyone still using the pro packages given what Blender can do for free?

Apparently despite the fact it has virtually everything a 3d artist wants, the UI is horrible. The UI however was not initially designed by the FOSS community.

Ever tried to use Blender?

Yes.

It'll have you run screaming for Maya before the day is out.

I can't figure out Maya.

Most open source graphics software is more about what the programmers want than the end users.

If that's the case then Blender would not be running production studios to figure out what problems are with the software and then fixing them.

There's some amazing open source software like Open Office, I'd pay for it quicker than Microsoft Office.

You can, it's called Staroffice.

Gimp is perfectly usable so long as you aren't doing high end graphics for publishing.

GIMP is fine, you just need to know how to use it. A lot of people complain about the lack of CMYK color profiles, I figured out how to set them up myself - obviously the people who tried it never bothered to learn the software properly. It is not Photoshop, the software's design goal is just for image manipulation and many people don't seem to get that.

Open source still needs to catch up.

It's nothing to do with the development philosophy catching up though. It's the exact same issue that proprietary developers would be having if they were developing CAD software from scratch.

Blender

[LetterRip]

If they didn't care for previous versions of Blender, they might want to try Blender 2.50alpha or a more recent test build (next testing build within 2 months), it is much more similar to maya and 3DS Max in layout and can have bindings customized.

LetterRip

Next question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok guys, thanx for the CAD recommendations.

now, I have to ask... can you sugest good books (preferable free) about calculus, differential equations, mechanics, and chemistry?

Re:Next question...

[east coast]

Will a kick ass Speak and Spell hack help any?

HEY GUYS

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to turn my used Toyota into a rocketship to get to the moon. Serious, no joke. However I'm having a hard time trying to program everything in QBasic, it seems the MSDOS console I shoved into the dashboard keeps crashing and my brakes don't work. Can you recommend an open source solution instead?

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

You'll probably end up needing some specialized, proprietary hardware if nothing else. You can't just whack any CPU you like in to your craft and call it good. You are dealing with a harsh environment and you need things to deal with that. Radiation hardening would be one, so that you aren't crashing all the time due to a bit getting flipped by solar radiation. Also for important things it had better be nice and redundant. You can just say "Oh just fix the bug and recompile" when you are talking about the air filtration system or the like.

Sending humans in to space and bringing them back alive is HARD, and thus expensive. Sending them to the moon is harder, and so on. This isn't the sort of thing that you can just knock together in your basement and say "Ya this'll work."

Re:No kidding

[nedlohs]

While I can't see the linked page, the summary contains no mention of either bringing them back, or having them survive the trip.

That makes it a little easier (though still very expensive).

Re:No kidding

[TheRaven64]

Actually, that's probably the easiest bit. The European Space Agency funded a couple of open source CPU designs, so you can get rad-hardened open source SPARC32 CPUs quite easily. They will quite happily run *BSD or older versions of Solaris. Maybe even Linux if the painfully broken MMU handling on SPARC32 has been fixed.

Re:No kidding

[Aceticon]

If the man and women they intend to put on the moon need not to be "living and breathing" (i.e. if they're aiming at "Moon burials") it would save tremendous amounts of payload in Life-Support, plus Landing & Return vehicle.

Actually, now that I think about it, the market for Moon burials could probably lower the barrier to entry for a startup aiming at actually sending living and breathing humans to the Moon and back - how many people out there would be willing to pay, sau $200.000 to be buried on the Moon!???

Re:No kidding

[L4t3r4lu5]

All they need is to do another of those "kinetic impact" experiments with a corpse on the end.

Seempulz!

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd still go.

Or before even that...

[mnemonic_]

They're worrying about CAD when they should be worrying about calculations and broad, system-level design. Remember, the first moon missions took place without the use of CAD. Detail designing the parts is a relatively small part of aerospace engineering. A better approach would be to prove their engineering legitimacy by analysis, then impress IBM/Dassault enough to donate a CATIA license to them. Give the rough launch vehicle design, the mission orbit design, the reentry vehicle type, and detailed quantified justifications and tradeoff studies for everything. It should be heavy with physics, and the calculations should be airtight. Expect a 500+ page technical report for this scale of project at this preliminary stage. Any explanatory sketches can be done by hand or any illustration program. You only need CAD when you're (1) ready to machine parts or (2) ready for detailed computational analysis. These guys are jumping the gun.

CAD isn't just about coming up with the part geometry by the way. Modern CAD/PLM involves massive amounts of metadata about materials, dimensions/tolerances (all locked in proprietary file formats), and keeping track of the relationships between parts, sub-assemblies and assemblies. You don't want to manually copy & paste 300 fasteners each time you recalculate stresses on a rocket nozzle, do you? It also automates many tedious design efforts. Want to figure out how to snake twenty miles of wiring, hydraulics and other tubing through a rocket with a hundred thousand parts? Oh also, each type of cable/tubing has a different minimum bend radius because of material stresses. Arc it too tightly and it cracks open during the launch vibrations, after having fatigued due to ambient thermal variations. And these are just a couple mechanical aspects of such a sprawling project that CAD must handle. You could "draw" the parts of just about any modern machine (fighter jet, car, bicycle) with an old copy of Maya used for the CGI in Jurassic Park. It'd be useless for analysis though because of the low numerical precision, and impossible for engineering because they have the most primitive handling of parametric modeling, and crude ability to work with multi-component (thousands) geometry.

Any teenager can come up with some gee-whiz 3d animation (that Mars lander animation from years ago was done by one). Could any teenager get funding for a mission to the moon? Work on your numbers first, then worry about software, you IT geeks you.

Re:Or before even that...

[Progman3K]

No, they're right.

The know-how of the original moon landings is all but lost now.

This appears to be an attempt to prevent that happening by using open-source software.

One of the arguments we've heard many times in favour of open-source software is that you can always adapt it, move your data into newer environments and make it live on.

It may take them a long time, they may not even be the ones who end up finishing the project, sure, but using open tools and open formats IS the way to go.

Re:Or before even that...

[inKubus]

It's open source, so you could contribute your ideas on their site. Just a thought. Personally, I think if you took everyone on Slashdot and got them to contribute you might be able to find some good solutions to the basic systemic problems of going to the moon and get enough momentum that you could do another round of donations and actually get something from the big boys. But I do agree that asking for an open source CAD project is kindof.... backwards.

Re:Or before even that...

[TheKidWho]

They didn't even use software back then... Way to spin something.

The know-how hasn't disappeared, what's disappeared is the political will.

Re:Or before even that...

[pipingguy]

Remember, the first moon missions took place without the use of CAD.

That's hard to believe, isn't it?

Nowadays, *everything* is designed with CAD, so energetic and naive young people that have experimented with computer-aided software think, "That's easy!" and then...

Reminds me of Sir Robin at the Bridge of Death.

Re:Or before even that...

[robot256]

Kudos to that. If somebody threw NASA $100 billion *and cut some red tape* then we could totally get back on the moon in a reasonable length of time. It's true that the blueprints for the Saturn V have disappeared, but we still know how to design rockets. And it's still hard.

Re:Or before even that...

[Paul Fernhout]

I agree with your point about the need for analysis first (basically, simulation), as I said in this reply to another poster:
    http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531702&cid=30977230
But with that said, a lot of analysis involves a co-evolution of tools and designs and the community, as Doug Engelbart talked about.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
So, there is a lot of value to considering the whole system at once and iterating on it in a free and open source way. This is sort of like the Wikipedia software co-evolving with the content and the user community (although it had a proprietary start at first). Clay Shirky talks about some of these coevolution ideas too:
    http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
But even more than what you outline, it seems a group of four people with some funding might have the most leverage creating a critical mass of information about space habitation to the point where thousands of others were helping on a voluntary basis.

Re:Or before even that...

[dbIII]

Nice long bit of text there, but from the summary it really looks like they just want a CAD front end to help them draw their concept art.

Re:Or before even that...

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, I strongly agree with all your points, but would like to add a couple of collateral considerations.

In the preliminary design phase, you also have to have proof-of-concept hardware design to work from. In this case, that would be the launch and boost vehicles, translunar injection systems, trans-earth injection systems, crew systems, descent modules, landing systems, surface habitat systems, and terrestrial return (reentry, landing) systems. These have to be envisioned, and then they have to be drawn.

Now: When I was in school, we had these things called "mechanical pencils" and other things called rulers. Everyone used them for the first major engineering class in college, Engineering Design (and Drafting), because we didn't have CAD programs to produce the drawings otherwise. Today, at least where I work, every kid in Engineering has to buy a student copy of AutoCAD as a course requirement if they have any expectation of passing Engineering Design and GRAPHICS 101. They're not encouraged... nor allowed... to use pencil and paper for major assignments, either. Simply put, if they don't use the computer program, they can't draw the parts reliably. Like we did when I worked at Johnson Space Center.

And, this isn't "Back when I was a kid" either. I fear we did lose something not teaching good manual practice, but the results that can be turned out by a good electronic draftsman using AutoCAD or another, even better package, are immensely better than what someone can turn out by hand. And for the record, while at Johnson, I hired a really good AutoCAD technician, who made a couple of my projects stellar because of the work he did.

Well rendered mechanical drawings lead to better analysis, a point you make in your post, but for a small, poor startup, they might not need Really High End Systems, but rather, something to get them to PDR. Preliminary Design Review is all about the basics, something else you point out (we're really in pretty violent agreement here). It'd be nice if their renderings and rough calculations were done with NASTRAN and MATLAB, and CATIA, but at this stage, if they're simply trying to get a PDR done they might be willing to admit they're gonna redesign a lot of stuff and simply take a stab at decent approximations in cheap CAD software. If I want to have a sleepless night, I think about the number of redesigned a couple of my projects went through to fly on Shuttle and Spacelab. In fact, I wish now I'd done the PDR drawings with Crayon and butcher paper, for all the respect they got from the PDR review team.

I'd like to think we're going to see someone solve the problem. What the original poster asked for was FOSS CAD software with some decent capabilities. You know, I'd like to see it too. I don't need to design space hardware anymore, but for my new office move, I'd like to be able to read AutoCAD files and see the results, and finding a decent 2D FOSS package has been difficult.

CAE Linux anyone ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try CaeLinux http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/ a bootable CD distribution which is basically a collection of different open source Cad apps
I'm hoping to make a reprap 3d printer at some point, so I've been looking into writing some ebuild scripts to get some of the stuff from caelinux into gentoo
like Salome, elmerfem, brlcad

I'm not an expert in CAD mind you but some of the below may be useful

One of the things I've discovered is that there's a difference between 3D Cad and 3D Modeling software
Modeling is about approximating the appearance of an object for appearance sake only, usually using a mesh / grid of some kind, this is a typical use for Blender
CAD is about what the object is made of, and it's physical dimensions in real space, typically objects are constructed from primitives such as a hollowed out cylinder for example
Modeling = what you can see the outside appearance, CAD = the innards, what it's made of and more of a focus on measurements in real space

If your going to design something that's going to be built it's probably better to design it in Cad software first
then convert it to a modeling form later on for the sake of pretty pictures / animations / appearances in a demonstration etc.
This way the original design is stored in a form where there's actual physical measurements (in mm for example)
and in a form that can be manufactured (drill holes at these points here and here etc)

While Blender could in theory support CAD capability, I think it's current features are lacking in that area
(although it is open source so if you want to add those features go right ahead)
From a commercial perspective I think the 2 main packages are Catia and Solidworks

Also If you want to simulate the environment on a 3D Cad object, the usual way is via FEM or Finite Element Analysis
This is the sort of thing used to simulate the way temperature travels through an object made of different materials for example
I think Catia / Solidwords have this sort of thing already inbuilt, in the case of open source software there's a lot of separate packages to play around with (elmerfem for example)
I think the linux cae pages have some good tutorials / examples on this
http://www.caelinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc:CAETutorials

Business model

[ThreeGigs]

If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.

If one could do a shot similar to Apollo, but unmanned, several metric tons could be returned, and be quite profitable.

Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.

Re:Business model

[gandhi_2]

How many kilos of moon can be transferred to earth before the orbits are affected?

Re:Business model

[AnotherUsername]

I can see it now...in 500 years, there is no moon, because it has been mined by corporations for moon rocks.

Re:Business model

[TBoon]

The cost of the Apollo space program is commonly given as $25 billion. When adjusted to 2005 dollars this would approximate to $135 billion.

200.000g * $2000 = $400 million. Granted, there was a bunch of first-time research and pesky human requirements to take care of back then, so presumably an unmanned rock-collector should be cheaper. Wonder what the cost per mission would be, how many trips they would have to do before breaking even, and if they would have affected the price of moon-rocks enough to affect their revenue by then...

Re:Business model

[Anonymous Coward]

But wouldn't that be a good thing? Then we wouldn't have night time at all.

Re:Business model

[biryokumaru]

It would certainly help with the werewolf problem as well.

Re:Business model

[jamesh]

How many kilos of moon can be transferred to earth before the orbits are affected?

Well... anything >0. You probably mean by a significant amount though, so you are going to have to quantify what that is. I'm not sure what the ratio is of the stuff we've put on the moon vs the stuff we've taken off it...

Re:Business model

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but.. would it still be profitable AFTER the cost of taking it back with you is deducted?

Re:Business model

[MartinSchou]

According to the last story on the space cannon, the cheapest current cost to orbit was 11,000 dollar pr kg.

The Apollo lunar module weighed 14,696 kg. That's 161,656,000 dollars just to get the damn thing into an orbit. A moon shot will be significantly more expensive.

And that's just the fuel costs. This doesn't include anything else. 161 million dollars to lift a lunar lander module into low earth orbit.

$2,000/gram of moon rock will make a dent into the expenses, but it won't make it profitable.

Re:Business model

[Diddlbiker]

The outrageous price for moonrocks is largely based on how incredible rare they are (on earth, at least).
When you start bringing in those rocks by the ton, price will drop significantly. Nobody is going to pay $2000 per gram when they know you're sitting on 5 tons of that stuff. They'll just wait until you are forced to sell at a lower price.

Re:Business model

[adamkennedy]

Supply, meet Demand.

Moon rocks are $2000 a gram because they are astonishly rare, something you'll happily be taking care of for us.

Your income isn't the price now, it's the area under the curve of the price as your 200 kilograms of rock drives the price down.

Re:Business model

[nazsco]

Fly indiana jones and have him leave a bag of peebles when taking the rocks.

Re:Business model

[CrazyJim1]

Thats no moon.

Re:Business model

[oatworm]

I find your lack of original conversation discouraging.

(Yeah, yeah - I'm just part of the problem, blah blah blah...)

Re:Business model

[sumdumass]

In the beginning they might pay it as there seems to be a lot of researchers who have moon rocks on their wish list and a bunch of rich people with too much money wanting some sort of bragging rights.

However, there will come a time when they are too common and the value will drop. Then again, a lot of moon rocks aren't exactly moon rocks either, they are/can be meteorites that struck the moon which makes them foreign to it. That poses an interesting concept for study because you would be able to study meteors that weren't exposed to insane amounts of heat/friction while entering an atmosphere. The possibilities of signs of organic life increases as well as the ability to study natural formations without alterations as we are exposed to with meteorites on earth. There might still be a niche market for them depending on exactly how much is brought back.

Re:Business model

[Shatrat]

It's only that valuable because nobody is bringing any back.
If someone is bringing down 200 kilos every few months you had better believe the price will drop to nothing.
It's not as though it's actually useful for anything but study, and once you have some to study you don't need more just like it.

Re:Business model

[Idiomatick]

Spacex has done it for well less than a billion. Not to the moon but they have put satellites into LEO and have lunar (orbit/impact, 4500kg) capabilities as well as a space ship to dock with the ISS... Times have changed :D ...... Not to belittle the problems involved in actually landing on and getting off the moon. But I think they can manage.

Re:Business model

[Tsar]

Fly indiana jones and have him leave a bag of peebles when taking the rocks.

Harrison Ford probably wouldn't be interested in the venture at this point in his life. Also, I doubt that Mario Van Peebles could be convinced to part with such a personal item.

Re:Business model

[barfy]

for 2000 dollars a gram, it better get me REALLY fucking high!

Re:Business model

[dwilkinson]

Supply, meet Demand.

Moon rocks are $2000 a gram because they are astonishly rare, something you'll happily be taking care of for us.

Your income isn't the price now, it's the area under the curve of the price as your 200 kilograms of rock drives the price down.

This was interorbital's business model not ours. They are pre-selling moon rocks.

Re:Business model

[fractoid]

If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.

You're saying $2mil per kilogram? Taking inflation into account, that's more valuable than Unobtanium! O.o

Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.

Depends whether you can convince Chinese businessmen that it'll give more yang to their wang.

Re:Business model

[fractoid]

When you start bringing in those rocks by the ton, price will drop significantly. Nobody is going to pay $2000 per gram when they know you're sitting on 5 tons of that stuff. They'll just wait until you are forced to sell at a lower price.

That's why you don't do a NASA-scale expedition and bring back a ton. You do a small-scale automated mission to bring back a couple of kilos, and you do it on a shoestring budget, and you sell it 1g-5g at a time on your website.

Re:Business model

[CAIMLAS]

If there were additional moon rock for sale, it would deflate its relative value. If multiple companies start doing it, funding from such a venture would cease to be possible.

Re:Business model

[TBoon]

My point exactly. The question is "how much would they need to bring back to break even?" and "how much would they have deflated the value of moon rocks by then?"

If they could recover costs in 3-4 trips, it probably wouldn't affect the market value too much. But if they would need 100 trips, they might just as well consider it a nice bonus rather than a primary objective. (And as someone else pointed out, just the fuel-costs of getting stuff into orbit eliminates this as the primary source of income.)

Re:Business model

[Mikkeles]

Maybe so, but that scenario seems not to have affected the price of diamonds.

Re:Business model

[sensei moreh]

Have you ever looked at moon rocks? For the most part, they look a lot like rocks one finds right here on Earth. I think $2K/g is a bit overpriced.

Re:Business model

[Tetsujin]

How many kilos of moon can be transferred to earth before the orbits are affected?

Well... anything >0.

Hell, you don't even need to land - Just fly on the right trajectory past the moon and you can steal some of its kinetic energy...

Re:Business model

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even better, ask yourself what people would pay for a kilogram of cocaine from the moon. At least its a product with some utility.

Re:Business model

[Anonymous Coward]

But he said 200 kilos, not 200g. 1kg=1000g (of course), so the end result is 400 billion. Which is well over the quoted estimate of the cost.

The most serious post yet

[Overzeetop]

The parent has given you the answer you don't want, but it is nonetheless the correct one. There are several intellicad based products which are fairly mature (BricsCAD, for example) which are also interoperable with commercial software to an extent. Still, they're even more limited than the commercial products - both in capability and in productivity.

It's been 10 years since I was in aerospace (NASA and Orbital Sciences, FWIW), but the big push at the time was Pro/Engineer. They were, back in the late 90s, where AutoCAD is today. The learning curve was difficult and the software expensive - but it was damned impressive, and it got the job done on several complex geometry products.

It sounds like you're not going to the moon, but rather are exploring funding options and sources for a startup who's ultimate goal is intended to be a moon landing. If you were going to the moon, I would suggest you start looking at FEM and CFD modeling software for the structures (my area of expertise), and the myriad custom software bits for each of the critical components. I believe NASTRAN is open source, though I'm not aware of a GUI front end (which you will dearly want). FLAGRO (Also a NASA project) should be open source for fracture mechanics analysis, but it was really in its infancy when I left NASA.

This will sound funny, but you might want to go check with the amateur rocket guys to see what they're using. RockSIM is the gold standard for 6DOF simulations for rockets traveling up to the edge of space, if you're on a budget, but it's not open source. There is an OSS project very similar to RockSIM - I think it's called RASaero.

There has been a lot of money invested in creating tools for much of what you want to do - you'll be better served in the long run to leverage the closed source options, focusing on keeping _your_ IP free for anyone to use - if that's your intent. You can always give away your CADD - and most packages have output/converters to fully defined - of not OSS - formats.

Re:The most serious post yet

[drinkypoo]

Unless I am very much mistaken, NASTRAN is Open but not Free or free. If I am wrong, I would very much like to know.

Re:The most serious post yet

[VisceralLogic]

This will sound funny, but you might want to go check with the amateur rocket guys to see what they're using. RockSIM is the gold standard for 6DOF simulations for rockets traveling up to the edge of space, if you're on a budget, but it's not open source. There is an OSS project very similar to RockSIM - I think it's called RASaero.

Check out POST II, NASA's Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories. It's in pretty wide use, and should be free from NASA for US persons.

Re:The most serious post yet

[Overzeetop]

I'm honestly not sure. I thought the code development had been mostly abandoned back in the 80s by NASA, with MSC taking the code base and expanding it first, and others expanding it as well as producing GUIs (FEMAP was one of the first with a GUI and solver implementation for x86 processors under NT). Back when I worked with it, the cost to purchase a license - though expensive - was trivial in comparison to the effort required to create an input deck by hand. A single analysis job could be paid back in the cost of a $5000 license in manpower saved over full had coding and data reduction/review (we still hand coded input cases, esp. for random vibration, and spot checked the output data directly in those days). Again, I was a user, not a developer, and it was a tool - I didn't get into the politics.

Re:The most serious post yet

[drinkypoo]

From what I've read, MSC purchased for a trivial amount of money a partially exclusive source license.

Re:The most serious post yet

[Anonymous Coward]

You people are pansies! Just throw it into Maxima via TexMacs and process the output with Python. Feed it to gnuplot for your artists or output it to their favorite blender format. I'm so tired of NASA, Lockheed, and Boeing retards who think they need $100,000 software because they are too lazy to take advantage of the FOSS libraries.

I worked on programming dark matter search software and while it's not trivial, you don't need to spend a dime because ALL of the best software is produced by universities and open source... well known.

Obligatory...

[Third Position]

Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model?

1. Build website.
2. Whore it on Slashdot.
3. ?????
4. Profit!

Re:Obligatory...

[fm6]

I think that's the business model they're currently using. It doesn't have a great track record.

Re:Obligatory...

[Paul server guy]

Nope, Wishing I hadn't posted the website at all, I'm just looking for some software to let the Engineers share data with the Artists, Not stir up this hornets nest.

Re:Obligatory...

[jedibfa]

Have you seen the list of Open Engineering Tools over at DevelopSpace (http://wiki.developspace.net/Open_Source_Engineering_Tools)? Not sure if it helps with the immediate need, but it is the most comprehensive list of open source tools for all things engineering I have found.

Re:Obligatory...

[Paul server guy]

I'll have Gary go look, Thank you...

Re:Obligatory...

[gessel]

So, anybody help you find anything yet?

I only know of BRL-CAD that would be suitable for defining geometry that you could actually fabricate (as opposed to geometry for pretty pictures).

http://brlcad.org/

It has hit /. before http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/08/1823248

Re:Obligatory...

[Anonymous Coward]

-> Not stir up this hornets nest.

Yep, it's really too bad what's happened to slashdot lately, isn't it?

Keep up the good work, guys.

Re:Obligatory...

[bzipitidoo]

There isn't any good open source CAD software. And, there isn't any CAD software that I know of, open or closed, that has a good interface. I have not seen much CAD software recently, but I suspect they are as closed, insular, and uncompetitive as ever, and that their software still suffers from this. Still insanely expensive, and still full of embarrassingly unpolished user interactions that would never fly in other kinds of applications. We've been needing good open source CAD software for many years.

BRL-CAD is a case in point. Miserable interface. AutoCAD was slow to get with the GUI-- version 12 from the early 90s still had a text based interface. That wouldn't be so terrible, but even with all the effort they saved in not doing a GUI, they still couldn't make a decent text screen interface. An example of what I mean is the dialog to load a drawing. You had to type in the name of the file you wanted, not select from a list, and you had to do it from memory or a note because it would not display any file names while it was waiting for your input. To see a listing of files, there was a separate menu item. And, couldn't press one key to select a menu item, no, had to follow that keypress with a press of the Enter key. Unbelievably crude. I have not seen recent versions of AutoCAD, but I suspect that their interface still stinks. Another terrible feature that seems common to a great many CAD interfaces is this idea of entering points into a drawing or diagram with the mouse pointer. Forces you to spend lots of time making extremely small mouse movements to get that pointer on 4.2, not 4.19999 or 4.20001. They all have grids and "snap to grid" features to help with that, but that's not enough. Then, to do something like a simple pan, you have to dig down into the menus, choose how you want it to interpret the numbers or points it is about to demand, and then give it those numbers or points. The interface to typical CAD software is full of garbage like that. Contrast that with how you move around in a typical 1st person shooter. They really, really need get a clue and look to game interfaces for some inspiration.

I gave FreeCAD a quick try. When it became clear that just getting FreeCAD to compile in Linux was going to be a big job, I dropped it.

CAE Linux anyone?

[garlicbready]

Try CaeLinux http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/ a bootable CD distribution which is basically a collection of different open source Cad apps
I'm hoping to make a reprap 3d printer at some point, so I've been looking into writing some ebuild scripts to get some of the stuff from caelinux into gentoo
like Salome, elmerfem, brlcad

I'm not an expert in CAD mind you but some of the below may be useful

One of the things I've discovered is that there's a difference between 3D Cad and 3D Modeling software
Modeling is about approximating the appearance of an object for appearance sake only, usually using a mesh / grid of some kind, this is a typical use for Blender
CAD is about what the object is made of, and it's physical dimensions in real space, typically objects are constructed from primitives such as a hollowed out cylinder for example
Modeling = what you can see the outside appearance, CAD = the innards, what it's made of and more of a focus on measurements in real space

If your going to design something that's going to be built it's probably better to design it in Cad software first
then convert it to a modeling form later on for the sake of pretty pictures / animations / appearances in a demonstration etc.
This way the original design is stored in a form where there's actual physical measurements (in mm for example)
and in a form that can be manufactured (drill holes at these points here and here etc)

While Blender could in theory support CAD capability, I think it's current features are lacking in that area
(although it is open source so if you want to add those features go right ahead)
From a commercial perspective I think the 2 main packages are Catia and Solidworks

Also If you want to simulate the environment on a 3D Cad object, the usual way is via FEM or Finite Element Analysis
This is the sort of thing used to simulate the way temperature travels through an object made of different materials for example
I think Catia / Solidwords have this sort of thing already inbuilt, in the case of open source software there's a lot of separate packages to play around with (elmerfem for example)
I think the linux cae pages have some good tutorials / examples on this
http://www.caelinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc:CAETutorials

Slashdotted

[selven]

Google Cache link

CAE Linux

[The_Dougster]

There is one bright shining star in the otherwise empty void of free engineering software packages. I would suggest that you investigate CAE Linux . From their website

Based on the open-source CAE softwares Salomé, Code_Aster, Code_Saturne and OpenFOAM , you can load your CAD geometry in Salomé and start partitionning and meshing your problem in just 5 minutes.

That being said, I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've messed around with CAE Linux, and this is *not* anything even close to what you get with Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor. While the FEA end is good, maybe even great, the modeling functionality is very basic and more akin to what you get with ANSYS or ALGOR rather than a full blown 3D drafting package. Nevertheless, its a great package for engineers and students who want to do some meshing and otherwise learn the basics of finite element analysis. The site even offers a standalone distribution of Salome-Meca-2009.1 which is the core FEA bundle that comes with CAE Linux. I have successfully installed their blob in Gentoo into /opt and it runs on my system at least.

As far as full featured free 3D drafting packages, there really isn't any such animal yet. Yes, I've tried BRL-CAD, and no, I wouldn't consider it to be a viable option. You're going to have to look towards some sort of professional CAD package for that. At home, I use TurboCAD as a reasonably full-featured yet relatively inexpensive solution. There are a great many lower priced 3D drafting packages out there, so look around.

And I must say, I really admire your ambition here... hope it works out for you.

2d and 3d CAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Tate a look at GraphietOne, I don't know that the files can be imported into blender, but otherwise the application is worth a look. It's available in both free and proprietary versions, depending on how you intend to use the software.

Here's a link that lists some potential sites

[alexschmidt]

http://www.junauza.com/2009/12/free-and-open-source-cad-software-for.html You can also try VariCad at www.varicad.com Honestly, I think it's better to pony up the cash and get version of SolidWorks. See if you can split the costs with someone else. Then you will know for sure that is can handle the file formats of the other products.

Looking for 3D software to fake a moon landing

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know any good 3D open source software to fake a moon landing?

G'luck with that

[Quarters]

That you are more worried about making art with 3D models, and wanting a CAD package that will easily import into your 3D modeler of choice, instead of being worried about actual engineering makes me think this project will never get off the ground (all puns intended).

Here's a free CAD package that seems to be just the right caliber for your organization...Google SketchUp.

Re:G'luck with that

[pipingguy]

Actually, that's not a bad idea for what s/he seems to want to do.

SketchUp's pretty cool as a sort-of CAD program.

Re:G'luck with that

[Knacklappen]

Same discussion and same misguided focus as in the OScar project: http://www.theoscarproject.org/

The OpenLuna project will produce the same results. None.

Re:G'luck with that

[Knacklappen]

Dude, are you serious? Have you even used a CAD program (solid modeller with derived 2D drawings) once?

Re:G'luck with that

[pipingguy]

Are you aware of PDS, PDMS, SmartPlant?

Are you aware of the concept of deliverables?

Re:G'luck with that

[Knacklappen]

Thanks, that explains it... No further questions.

Huh?

[socceroos]

Mark Shuttleworth, is that you?

Re:Huh?

[a1x2]

Well, Larry Page and Sergey Brin will probably use http://sketchup.google.com/

Just bite the bullet and use ProE or Solidworks.

[Beltonius]

Post the models and analysis online - that's better in keeping with the ideal of a F/OSS project anyway. I use ProE professionally and had used Solidworks 2003-2007 while at school. ProE has all the required features and is improving with the UI, while Solidworks is the other way around. On the balance, they're both perfectly viable engineering tools.

However, getting all the features included (assemblies, full GTOL support in drafting, harnesses, ECAD integration etc) while maintaining a vaguely usable UI seems to be currently beyond what FOSS projects can deliver. The CAD market is growing and highly competitive - and even then the professionally-developed software has trouble getting these things right. A couple of weeks ago I was involved with a plastic part redesign because the ECAD -> ProE interface lost a couple capacitors in the translation and prototype parts ended up interfering.

FEA and CAM are two other areas that require a significant amount of effort to get 'right'. ANSYS (FEA) has been developed since at least the 1980's and is still either 'easy to use' or 'fully featured'. CAM (CNC pathing, etc) is critical for prototyping components quickly and accurately.

Add to all that, the fact that none of the open interchange CAD formats (STEP, IGES, STL for 3d) contain all/any of the metadata (parametric model data, dimensioning and tolerances, for example) that proprietary formats do. For CAD software to be useful, it must be able to interchange data with other systems - every company/effort will need to exchange CAD data with another at some point, to communicate with a partner, vendor, consultant etc.

Long story short, proprietary CAD packages are the best ones available, which should be the real concern for a manned space program (since people's lives are clearly immediately at stake). They have the experienced people in the jobs market and the extensive knowledgebase needed to work through day-to-day problems. I can just google something to find out how I can do what I need to in ProE, or walk down the hall and talk to the guy who's been using it for 20 years. If I needed to submit a bug request and wait for a response and work-around, I wouldn't be able to do my job.

Avocad-cad

[themusicgod1]

No one's mentioned avocad-cad yet?

Re:Avocad-cad

[Anonymous Coward]

No one's mentioned avocad-cad yet?

Hmmmm...main page announces a pre-alpha in March 2008, saying "avoCADo continues to push forward, albeit a bit slower than I would like."

Then nothing for almost 2 years. I'd say that's a dead end!

NASA did this with NO CAD software

[maxrate]

Ah, NASA already put someone on the moon - WITHOUT CAD SOFTWARE. Please, the costs of putting someone on the moon far exceed the cost of AutoCAD. Splurge a little.

to paraphrase the "up with people" song

[ClosedSource]

They used cheap engineering software and the moon-shot missed a mile,

The fellas in that rocket won't be back for quite a while.

Cenon - More CAM than CAD, but a possibility

[Rubinstien]

http://www.cenon.info/frame_gb.html

Very Viable Project.

[DoninIN]

Despite what everyone seems to be saying. I think I should point out two things. One, yes free CAD all sucks right now. Two this project is very viable. You just need to design and develop a concept, start a nest egg, begin investing in the projects future. If you can raise a few million dollars in the next couple of years, in fifty, or seventy-five years you'll have enough money to start building the mission. (You have to invest wisely, bank on the power of compound interest, and assume the cost of the mission will come down a couple orders of magnitude, but these aren't unreasonable assumptions.)

Re:Very Viable Project.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, Russia hasn't put a man on the moon, and they were in space over 50 years ago, before the US even.

Maybe these enthusiastic folks should tackle a smaller goal first, like... build a working go-cart.

Re:Very Viable Project.

[TheKidWho]

and assume the cost of the mission will come down a couple orders of magnitude, but these aren't unreasonable assumptions

Yeah, barring a complete change in the laws of physics or the construction of space elevator...

Existing OSS SW to fly to the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're interested in seeing open-source engineering software for getting to the moon, looks like the people developing it will be *you*. That wasn't part of your plan? What exactly is your plan, and how is it "open source" if that's not the case?

Avocad is pre-alpha and not undated

[physburn]

Avocad is pre-alpha software and hasn't been updated since March 2008. Hope your moon rocket is more reliable than that.

---

CAD Feed @ Feed Distiller

Going beyond CAD to simulation

[Paul Fernhout]

The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).

Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?

But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.

Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."

That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).

Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:

Re:Going beyond CAD to simulation

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing,

Or he understands it and realizes the cultural thing is absolutely irrelevant and mindless, especially if one is attempting a moon shot.

Fuck culture. The vacuum, Van Allen belts and the gravity well don't give a shit about your utopic vision of digital purity.

Do it properly or someone is going to die a quick death.

Use the best tools, regardless of license

[harlows_monkeys]

If I were riding a spacecraft to the moon (or riding any vehicle that could easily kill me), I'd want it designed with the best tools for getting the job done. If that's a closed source tool, buy the closed source tool.

Re:Use the best tools, regardless of license

[Knacklappen]

Exactly!

Otherwise, the OpenLuna project will attract the same kind of day-dreaming non-engineers as the OSCar-project did: http://www.theoscarproject.org/

And it will produce the same results: none.


PS: Actually, I read more or less EXACTLY the same question in the OSCar forum, and the answers were scaring. People were recommending Blender, Inkscape, and the like. They uttered phrases like "using CAD instead of CFD". Jeezus...

Re:Use the best tools, regardless of license

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to pick on you, as you're not the only one with that view here, but...

The point is, this guy was asking what software, not if he should be doing this at all. "Man in sheds" have achieved a lot over the years, and if these guys want to do this (either in their free time, or as a job, or whatever) then that's up to them, isn't it?

I would expect, with sufficient will alone, these guys could get something viable together that could get into space. From then on, it's just about getting money to actually build and then fly. I'll bet you if they manage all that on a shoe-string that the Big Money will get interested and solutions will become easier for them. Who cares what software they used? If it works, it works - they could design it with an Etcher Sketch for all I care.

These guys think they can do this. That puts them one step ahead of me, because I'm pretty sure I can't do it. I (like you) might think they're bonkers, but at the same time, I say "good on 'em" - at least they're giving it a go, which is several steps ahead of most of us.

Re:Use the best tools, regardless of license

[sebock]

One would think you wanted the best Minds doing the design work rather than just using the best tools. Give a chimp a plasma torch and a kiln...

It was possible to send man to the moon using slide rulers and calculators, and less power than a computer with a '286 had.

Put a woman back on the moon?

[dukw_butter]

You're going to "put a man (and woman) back on the moon?" Not possible. No woman has ever been to the moon.

"professional"

[OrangeTide]

professional CAD users need to grow some balls and use BRL-CAD.

Re:"professional"

[digitalunity]

No, they don't.

You obviously don't understand the manufacturing market if you can't see the mass appeal in Pro/E, SolidWorks, Catia, Inventor and CoCreate. These 5 programs dominate their market because they're extremely easy to use and designers can be very productive with them.

BRL-CAD isn't comparable. Not by a long shot.

Re:"professional"

[OrangeTide]

Dentists need to grow some balls and use hand tools only.

Anybody know how hard it is to

[Anonymous Coward]

write a decent looking website when your thirsty, and riding a camel?

"Katya designed and will continue to update and maintain the current OpenLuna website. She is currently operating from the Sahara Desert in Morocco."

Apparently very.

Ah you kids, you make me laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahahahahahahahahaha... ahahahahahahhahahahahahaaa! (deep breath) Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah ahahahaha ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Yeah right... and your space rocket, I bet it looks like the ones in the tintin books. Are you making helmets out of ice cream tubs?

Ahahhahahahhahahahahahahahahahaha...

They need a building.

[Animats]

I once met the CEO of Rotary Rocket (remember them? SSTO?) He told me that people started taking him seriously after they built their own vertical assembly building at Mojave.

Rotary Rocket failed because the proposed ultra-light rotary engine didn't work, and the off-the-shelf engine they substituted was too heavy to make it to orbit.

Slow and steady

[steveha]

Here is my advice: plan a slow-and-steady strategy, rather than a "space race" strategy. Plan for effectiveness over the long haul, rather than short-term results.

That means you will be doing things rather differently than Apollo.

For software, as far as I can tell, nothing exists that will meet your needs. Thus your first step is to figure out what free software has a hope of someday meeting your needs, then figure out how to get developers to work on it until it does meet your needs. So, actually, your very first step is to find an expert in rocket design who can tell you what features you need, what software exists that can do what you need (even if you don't want to use it because it is proprietary). If you are very very lucky, you might find a retired aerospace project manager who will give you advice for free. (I don't think this is far-fetched. Anyone who worked on rockets in the glory days will be old enough to be retired now, and you might find someone who shares your dream and will give advice for free.)

For simulations and engineering computations, you should look at SciPy. As I said above, it probably doesn't meet your needs now, but it has a solid foundation and lots of people working on it.

As far as a strategy for going to the moon, I don't claim to be an expert, but here is my advice.

You really, really do not want to try to re-create the Saturn V rocket. In fact, you don't want any design where you use up one rocket per moon trip. The slow-and-steady plan goes like this: First you get a "space pickup truck", some sort of launch vehicle that can reliably go to Earth orbit with a small payload (say, 1000 KG or so). Second, using many "space pickup" flights, you build a space station, and stock it with lots of oxygen, food, fuel, etc. Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel. Fourth, you build your "moon lander", which will be carried by the moon shuttle. Finally, you fuel up the moon shuttle and lander, and send a mission to the moon.

At that point, you have the infrastructure to visit the moon as often as you find convenient. You ferry up some more fuel, oxygen, and supplies, refuel the moon shuttle and lander, and off you go.

I'll point out that there are plenty of small companies trying to build a "space pickup truck" right now. You could sensibly just plan on hiring one of those, rather than trying to build your own launch vehicle. You won't get this project done tomorrow anyway, so you might as well start designing your space station and moon-specific hardware now, and just assume you can hire the orbital transport by the time you need it.

If someone gets a "space cannon" operational in time for you, so much the better. Use the cannon to send up lots of fuel and oxygen and such as cheaply as possible. In this case, you will want to build a "space tug" vehicle that can scoot around and collect the canisters shot up by the cannon.

The USA sent men to the moon using a cost-is-no-object, win-the-race strategy. You will do much better to incrementally build the infrastructure to go to the moon conveniently.

Good luck with your grand dream.

steveha

Re:Slow and steady

[steveha]

Two minor points:

0) I hope it was clear that the "space pickup truck" is not a disposable rocket, but some sort of reusable spacecraft. Either a single-stage-to-orbit or perhaps a two-stage-to-orbit (where the first stage is either recoverable or very very cheap). The important thing is to drive down operational costs; with an airplane such as a 747, fuel costs dominate, but with the space shuttle, operational costs completely overshadowed everything else. You want something that can fly to orbit, land, and fly to orbit again with a minimal turnaround time. Anything that needs man-centuries of labor to overhaul it between flights is right out.

1) "Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel." Erm, I meant to say "between the two." Sorry.

steveha

Re:Just bite the bullet and use ProE or Solidworks

[Knacklappen]

The same question about "fully featured and easy to use" CAD programs were asked when the OScar project started: http://www.theoscarproject.org/

I answered as you did above. People did not want to hear it. I suspect, they never figured out the difference between CAD, CAM, CFD, FEM versus 3D animation modelling packages (Blender, Maya), 2D vector drawing programs (Inkscape) and MS Paint (to be a bit drastic).

The type of high-visibility OS hardware projects seem to attract only day-dreaming non-engineers, which is what repells real engineers even further (because you have to deal with such people at work already, why having them around during your spare time, too?)...

To the moon, Alice!

[Quiet_Desperation]

OpenLuna is a volunteer organization: we welcome and encourage your participation beyond basic membership. If you desire active involvement, introduce yourself to us and we will find a way to use your talents.

"We're particularly interested in people who might have one or more engines lying around capable of driving a multi-ton payload to a translunar injection. Oh, and any radiation shielded crew modules and/or several billion dollars in venture capital would be an added plus!"

"We have a prototype all drawed up and everything!"

"We'd like to thank the Sustainable Farming Student Collective at Berkeley for the astronaut garb. Who would have thought you could make a spacesuit out of hemp?""

Are you insane?

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived with Windows my entire life until I left college, and embraced the FOSS community. Taught myself Linux. Taught myself a lot of things over the years.
I honestly would bleed for the concept of FOSS. To me, it's like handing the first man to own a model T his own torque wrench- totally freeing him to do something
he's never done before, with something he'll be experiencing for the first time.

But I'm sorry, FOSS CAD & Parametric CAD is total crap now, both from a usability and functionality standpoint. It's the one area that FOSS, I feel,
will never fill well. Why? 2 simple reasons:

1. User Interface- FOSS community, are you listening? Stop with all the damn menus. Learn how to make a decent GUI layer for some aspects of your
program. Even engineers are human- they need something to not only be easy to learn, but INTUITIVE. I'm not sugguesting it look like Fischer Price designed the
layout- just speak with a symbologist/iconographer. Seriously. Ask what your users do, and create usable icons and common actions.

Get over all your sanctimonious insistence on coding a program for numeric and input style- make even a single program with a decent GUI interface. Don't think I'm
calling out Linux people specifically- I use Autodesk Inventor 2010. Yes, legally. I learn it at a community college, and the new version is guilty of that too- older versions
had a more intuitive GUI. The new version takes a LOT of getting used to.

2. GOOD 3D support and rendering-

With all I've seen the FOSS community capable of in graphic rendering (blender, gimp, etc.), why do we lag so far behind in 3D processing? Gaming support famously
suffers massively, and along with it, decent parametric modeling in real time. I have yet to find any native FOSS CAD program, for any OS, that actually renders in 3D
well, or mostly, at all. This is something harder to fix. If the FOSS community could pool their resources to one massive program, like Shuttleworth did for Ubuntu, we
might have a chance. It's a Herculean task, and one I've seen FOSS struggle with for years.

I use Inventor now because it works (with a TERRIBLE interface in 2010), but in 3D mode, extrusion modeling/building makes part design like sculpting clay, one I understand
the commands. It's another ballgame entirely. I *WISH* I could do that with a FOSS program- bad GUI or no!

Inventor also has full kinematic modeling, for testing motion of interacting parts, and integrated stress analysis. Considering NASTRAN is coded in FORTRAN, if I remember
right, even stress analysis software is pretty proprietary, and noone has updated that on a massive scale since the 1960s! We're talking software initially developed for NASA,
and hasn't been re-coded in almost 50 YEARS. Fifty. If NASA can't fund it, who the hell can? (insert jokes about Richard Branson here)

3D CAD and such specialized software in FOSS has a long way to go. I hope I'm wrong. I have yet to see even one that was usable for extrusion style modeling, which almost
anyone can pick up easily once they know how to navigate the interface. Last FOSS CAD program I tried was Q-CAD- among many others like it, did no 3D, no extrusions,
and was a very poor UI. Did 2D well, but it, and many other small CAD programs in native Linux did the same thing. Hell, the only FOSS CAD I've ever seen that COULD do 3D
was by EmachineShop.com, and for free software, the rendering was decent- but the GUI is overly simple, only icons, very limited in modeling scope, and constantly had issues
with basic lines joining together.

I'm sure flames await me- as I am a basic, and probably average Linux user with almost no coding skills, but I have much experience hands-on with this style of software in
Windows AND Linux. And you know what, for a guy like me that reads /. daily, for 10 years, and has tried every program I could find in this area, I hope I'm wrong. I really do.
I hope I've only scratched the surface- but everything I've seen till now pales in comparison to Inventor. And with a UI as bad as it, that's pretty bad.

FOSS - the cheapest of the cheap OUTSOURCING

[Anonymous Coward]

What fools works for free? Oh, right, slashdot fools you fool you

I think this is a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a troll trying to claim that one cannot get specialist CAD software as FOSS.

Apart from the fact that one actually CAN:

http://brlcad.org/
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page

It should also be noted that one can get very good commercial CAD software for a FOSS OS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VariCAD
http://www.varicad.com/en/home/

Re:I think this is a troll

[TheKidWho]

It should also be noted that one can get very good commercial CAD software for a FOSS OS

Uhh, almost all of the major CAD packages will work under Linux since the CAD packages were initially designed to run on UNIX decades ago...

Advice:

[guyminuslife]

I had an idea like this once.

Then I threw away my Adderall prescription. And/or hit puberty.

Seriously, lay off the uppers.

Bicycles will save us all

[rusl]

...and are not trivial!

Cars are trivial because they are going to be a footnote of stupidity in our history. A small blip. They overwhelm us now, but in a few hundred years they will just be archaeology and museums. Bicycles will still be in use. Probably also modern airplanes and spacecraft.

CYCAS

[rusl]

I've made some things in CYCAS 3d. It's not too bad but it is limited. I was using the free version. I'm not sure the license is free or not... I thought it was. It's more architectural software really. It was the only thing I could figure out how to use on linux anyway. There is also the Google CAD thing... but that is probably free only as beer.

Recently I got a chance to use Solidworks and I don't think I'm going back to CYCAS. If I was more into architecture though... it did have some features that I can't equate to Solidworks... but not nearly as many as vice versa.

Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the 1st of February not the 1st of April!

This project is a joke.

I have an idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like you have others issues (money) than finding good CAD software. However, you need to model something that goes moon and back, using only few dollars. Try this :

http://www.x-plane.com/index_desktop.html

It comes with advanced 3D modeller, moon and mars. :)

CAD software for what?

[TheDarkMaster]

Why FOSS CAD software full of bugs and missing half the functionality, or (really) expensive proprietary CAD programs, if you can still use the good old paper and ink? Just a reminder that there are more options.

It's just Role playing

[Anonymous Coward]

Their project seems to be kind of role playing rocket scientists. Their first priority is CAD because their first priority is eye candy to get more players. If they were serious, all they would need is to show basic pen and paper calculations, concept designs, and outline for budget first to get me interested. Expecially the budget is important. Now its seems to be way to have fun with friends and design web-sites and visualizations.

Then there is the target of the mission: Moon. ~10% of ear earth asteroids would be energetically easier to reach than moon. Even more so, if you want to bring something back. That would be interesting goal scientifically, NASA, ESA or JAXA might chip in if some private group would have reasonable plan and tiny probe to send to those asteroids to study them. That is also where the commercial interests in space exploration lie. 1 kg water in LEO is worth of $10,000. If someone sends probe to check out one of these potential moneymakers, it would be good idea.

Fries with that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing most negatvie-comment posters were born well after the Apollo program (where I was a young engineer). We, yes WE, put men on the moon using rockets built from hand-drawn blueprints and calculations verifited by slide-rules. Most of the budget was likely for man-hours for calculations and R&D verification that we take for granted now because computers do it all. The entire computing power used for Apollo can probably can fit on an iPhone -- my TI calculator has more computing power (and uses less energy) than mission control in Houston in 1970.

During a short power failure at McDonalds recently, I watched 3 staff struggle with pen and paper to mimic the subtraction of a cash register -- instead of simply COUNTING OUT the change (the simplest of algorithms not taught any longer). Your generation is so computer-stuck-up that you can't imagine that FOSS could actually assist in moonshot.

Shame on all of you who think that humanity couldn't accomplish major technological feats without MASSIVE computing power - go back to your history notes.

Re:Fries with that?

[Dirk Pitt]

Yes, R&D verification that was inefficient, and probably led to massive overbuilding and wasted cost in the fabrication and construction of the assemblies involved with Apollo.

Massively computed FE makes things cheaper and safer. It would be lunacy to even think about doing hand calcs for a multi-million DOF dynamics problem. The analysts that do this work in various manufacturing fields certainly have the mathematics capability to do what was done during Apollo, but they do things better now by leveraging the tools at their disposal.

I'd like to breed dragons with unicorns.

[Michael_gr]

What FOSS tools should I use for this?

You can try NaroCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/narocad/

Hi, neat project.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to port this to osx, but works well on linux.
Has finite element and flow solving.

Http://www.Salome-platform.org

This one is nice and light with quick sketch ability.

Http://code.google.com/p/heekscad/

Drop into #salome on freenode if you would like to discuss on Irc
Good Luck!

Real issue

[EvilBudMan]

The is a real issue in the lack of CAD software and accounting software that is capable. Flame me if you will, but it's true. I remember a time when AutoCAD supported or tried to support just about every OS. Then sometime int the 90's or late 80's they decided just to support windows only. Of course their might be some real high end Unix stuff that will work but lacking millions of dollars to know, I just couldn't say.

Look for yourself, most if not all programs are just not there. No parametrics, well not even up to 1990 yet compared with commercial software.
http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=CAD&type_of_search=soft&pmode=0&words=CAD&Search=Search

Computer Aided Engineering Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/

This distribution gives an excellent overview of which CAE applications exist for Linux.

Use the best - including out sourcing the hardware

[UnderCoverPenguin]

That's what the Artemis Project did (http://www.asi.org/adb/index.html). Their plan might actually have worked except it depended on using either the Titan IV or the Space Shuttle to get their trans-Lunar vehicle into LEO.

But they had the right ideas: Assemble existing components and sell the film rights. The SpaceHab modules were a great idea. Could still be if there were another launch vehicle that could carry a payload that large.

Nevertheless, their website appears to still have a lot of useful information on it,

Time Effective

[visionbeyond]

Looking at what your trying to accomplish, there is much more to consider than just being able to create 3D objects. While there are some free CAD software programs out there that can do a very nice job of limited spanning functionality, it would take a dedicated team years to develop any FOSS project to the level of AutoCAD. While Adobe is porting Photoshop to Linux, and GIMP is a very impressive alternative, it takes years for professionals to realize all that Photoshop can do. AutoCAD is the same, and has become the industry standard. Not only has amazing built-in functionality, like structural analysis, stress testing, and the lates version can do 3D renderings and animations built right into it. In the long run, you'll have spent enough time and resources trying to work with a FOSS CAD program, then it would have cost to just purchase AutoCAD. Sad, but true, and is an area I wish there was at least a competitive FOSS application available.

The bitch can't cook!

[Tetsujin]

"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?"

Hey, you laugh, but this happened to me. Sure enough, kidney was burnt to a crisp on one side, and all runny on the other...

What about Bezier surfaces design ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,
As said many times during this thread, you won't find any FOSS software that matches your (huge) requirements. I've been working on ProE, CATIA V4 & V5, SolidWorks, and to be honest, they provide a lot of integrated and proprietary functions that makes the price at the end. You can do some stress simu with FOSS, given the fact you have a meshed model, you can design a few parts with some free softs, but you cannot design a full project with all aspects (assembly, blue prints, stress & vibe analysis, kinetics, tubing and so on...) in only one package. CATIA V5 for example, which is a merely mature project now, is based on many years of coding and integration of customers will (automotive, aerospace, electronic mainly). I do not say it is perfect, but only a few will give you such tools.
But I must admit that your question made me think about something, let me explain. I'm working now as a Class A surface modeler for a french automotive brand, which is somewhat between CAD and Blender (or 3DS, or Maya) modeling. I only design complex surfaces (for visible parts of a car), but with the precision of CAD software. The magic key for that are Bezier patches and curves. The difference between you and me is that I do not need anything that moving control points on each surface, connecting them, and facing some of them (besides the fact that I must be able to import CAD surfaces from engineers, such as the engine or the structure, to be able to work - via .model, .CATpart, .iges etc...). That's all ! The software used are mainly ICEM Surf and Alias StudioTools, and apart from some important modules (viz, rendering, cuttings(?), curvature or joint analysis etc..) there are only a few basic functions. I think that these are the main target for an interesting FOSS project, because using some other FOSS libraries, one, with enough skills, could set up the base quickly I think.
As anyone heard of such a project ? Or anyone interested in building something like this ? I can help with my modeler experience if needed, but sadly, I'm not a coder... Oh, don't forget that these softwares are sold an arm and a leg, maybe it can help ;)

Nico

PS : check Bezier on wikipedia, there must be an article
PS2 : sorry for my asshole english, I'm a fucking froggy !

Re:What about Bezier surfaces design ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is my job such an unknown field ? Styled surfaces are commonly used for a while now... I thought that would interest at least one person =(

Cheers,
Nico

My preference is mute

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your preference?

I prefer we send remote rovers or other machines up. They are a much lighter and work 24/7. Also they don't complain about lack of oxygen, water or food and rarely poop.

Why would we want to send living people up there again? Maybe to see if our new metal clubs can hit the balls further now? Seriously tho. We already did so and it was pointless (value way less then expense). Besides PR, why would we ever want to put humans on the moon again? Don't forget that the PR value of walking on the moon is almost 0% compared to our first successes.

Now if you want to talk about getting satellites into space cheaply... there is something to discuss.

Well, to Answer the Question.

[LifesABeach]

Given the funding for this fine, and noble project. Maybe suggesting to the Engineers that they, "Do what it takes, and just suck it up." Or get ready to spend about $200,000 in a MCAD package, and some more money on PLC machine. About $1,000,000.00 will get them what they need, or they can read books on how to make machines that make parts for machines; then assemble the parts. I know its sounds like tough love, but this should have been evaluated at the beginning of the project, not at some midpoint, or Mile Stone point. I wish your project luck, and "God Speed..."

To the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dutch translation of "to the moon" also happens to mean "wasted".

On a different note: as it is commonly known that the Apollo landings were fake, I think that, for re-creating the Apollo project, you'd better be looking for 3D animation software, video editing software, motion capture software, and a good film studio. And this time, don't forget that flags don't move in vacuum, make sure the shadows point in the right direction, and make some stars visible.

AC3D is good

[Anonymous Coward]

AC3D does well for me as a simple modeler, should be good for CAD in an engineering sense, it certailnly isn't a tool for building organic forms but it's good at what it does.

http://www.inivis.com/

Stay thy venom

[Anonymous Coward]

The comments on this article are ridiculously negative.

What does it cost you to give them a little advice and not crush their dreams. Their goals may be lofty, maybe virtually unobtainable, but history if full of success stories of people trying the "impossible" and succeeding. That's the biggest problem with society right now defeatism. "We can't win so why try." I hope they do try and do succeed. The cost/difficulty might not be as bad as you think, it's been 50 years imagine what it would cost to make a Nexus One 50 years ago. And it's not like aerospace is a dormant field with out any innovation in the past 50 years. You can buy space shuttle parts for cheap, they are giving away engines to anyone who can take them away. Then reverse engineer most of the tech as the patents that do exist are expiring. It's not like the physics of getting to the moon is super advanced it's only rocket science not brain surgery. You cover most of what you need to plan the trips in physics 1. Or just FOIA your way to a flight plan. And what is the worst that happens, they put 10-20 years of solid work into a task they love and don't get people onto the moon. Oh no that destroys my life. They maybe just get something into orbit and improve the quality of open source CAD Software.

I use QCAD it probably isn't the most advanced CAD software. I learned CAD on CADkey lite in a mechanical drawing class in high school. It reminds me of that and is fine for generating rooms layouts and supports many standard formats for information sharing.

God Speed

i know this is an old thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive been playing with cad stations for over 20 years as i am sure many who have read this thread have also. My experience mostly centers around that ubiquitous CAD we all know the name of. I have read much of the pontificating and have a few thoughts. The first one is to all the geniuses who blather on about how cad programs are cobbled together yada yada yada. Get off you ass and at least help the community get a real start if you are so brilliant or shut up. So much furor is made about how superior linux/unix is yet when it comes to graphics (not raster images) it sux plain, simple, and to the point. There are those that would judge a system's capabilities by its graphic ability and I'm not talking photoshop either. Its not a small group either its some of the real "technical" people of industry, science, engineering, medicine, and construction. Now I know that most of the "geek" types here would call them a bunch of stupid doo doo heads because they don't luv or understand the wonderful environment that most linux distributions offer but the failing is not theirs. Dual booting is a joke, virtualization is a joke if it doesn't work for their needs why even consider it. Like some eloquent person so aptly phrased is; go pay your money. This is exactly what we do. The cost of the O/S, TCOA, all are irrelevant. We have a job to do and linux/unix is just plain fail. I'm not interested in the pontifications of a bunch of PFY's (BOFH) ranting about this and that. Either show a real effort of just get off it. When it comes to one of the most important field areas of computers - "Graphics" - Linux is not only not ready for prime time it is the MS/Paint of platforms and I am being generous. So this conversation is nothing more than navel gazing... /. not just irreverent but, not irrelevant ; not news just the boring prattling of l337 script kiddies

Blender??!!! WTF??

[tigersha]

"Blender" and "Moon Rocket" are two words which do not belong in the same sentence. You are joking, right?