At Johnson Space Center, the flight planning workstations are in the process of migrating from AIX to Red Hat.
The laptops on the spacestation that are used for command and control are also moving to Red Hat from Solaris.
Also there is a project in work to move the Mission Control Center workstations from Dec/Compaq/HP alphas runing True64 to a new platform. The two options under consideration are HP-UX and Red Hat.
Actually the Space Shuttle does have to worry about skipout. Any vehicle traveling faster than orbital velocity has to worry about it. The difference between the Space Shuttle and Apollo is the consequence of skipping out. If an Apollo capsule skips out it bounces off the atmosphere and flys past the earth and probably ends up in orbit around the sun. If the Shuttle skips out it ends up stuck in earth orbit, which is just as bad because it does not carry enough deorbit gas to do another deorbit burn. It will eventually come down in an uncontrolled manner, but not until after they have run out of power and air.
Now a little about re-entry: There are 2 thermal problems to worry about during re-entry. Heat Load and Heat Rate. The best way to think of these are maximum temperature and length of time at high temperature. If you come back from orbit at too steep of an angle you get too hot. If you come back too shallow you are hot for too long, or you skip out. In the first case you burn off the wings, in the second case you melt the structure under the thermal protection, in the third case you don't get home.
The Space Shuttle targets an entry that is a balance between heat rate and heat load (called a thermal trade off line). This is why after the Columbia accident they said that they would have had a hard time targeting a more benign entry. If they had come in steeper they would have burned up the tiles, if they had come in shallower they would have melted the wing structure.
As far as X-Prize entries are concerned, they really don't have to worry much about time at temperature because their entries are going to be rathar short. So their thermal protection just has to handle the max temp that they will get due to the aerodynamic heating, which is much less than the heating the Space Shuttle sees during entry.
I also work down the hall from some of the folks in this article, and I know quite a few of them from college (Co Cyclones). Anyways, I thought I would mention this project from United Space Alliance's Dual Program. USA is a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing that took over Shuttle Opperations a little while back (the group mentioned in this article is part of USA and has been for about year or so). The Dual program is a USA/Academic partnership for research in space operations. The project that I thought you might be interested in is the development of a space shuttle flight computer emulator for linux described here.
On another note, the group that I work in (Flight Design and Dynamics) may start looking into moving from our IBM/AIX platform to a Linux platform. Penguins in space! I guess that is a bit offtopic, but oh well.
Yes the CAVE has been around for a while. It was initially developed at U of Ill. Chicago by Carolina Cruz. Dr. Cruz then went to Iowa State University's VRAC (virtual reality application center) where she developed and built a bigger and better CAVE called the C2. I was a research assistant at ISU about the time ISU started working on building the C2. Very Cool stuff! Check out the links above if you want to see more info on it (mpegs, VRML, etc).
Animats posted a comment about the problems with the CAVE's corners, while this is noticable, a lot can be done to make it look better. The CAVE software includes corrections that make the images line up at the joints. Its not perfect, but a heck of a lot cheaper than a dome visual.
Most CAVE's have 3 screens and sometimes a floor projection. The new ISU C6 will have screens for all 6 sides of the cube, for total immersion! No its not a Holodeck, but we are getting close!
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At Johnson Space Center, the flight planning workstations are in the process of migrating from AIX to Red Hat.
The laptops on the spacestation that are used for command and control are also moving to Red Hat from Solaris.
Also there is a project in work to move the Mission Control Center workstations from Dec/Compaq/HP alphas runing True64 to a new platform. The two options under consideration are HP-UX and Red Hat.
Actually the Space Shuttle does have to worry about skipout. Any vehicle traveling faster than orbital velocity has to worry about it. The difference between the Space Shuttle and Apollo is the consequence of skipping out. If an Apollo capsule skips out it bounces off the atmosphere and flys past the earth and probably ends up in orbit around the sun. If the Shuttle skips out it ends up stuck in earth orbit, which is just as bad because it does not carry enough deorbit gas to do another deorbit burn. It will eventually come down in an uncontrolled manner, but not until after they have run out of power and air.
Now a little about re-entry: There are 2 thermal problems to worry about during re-entry. Heat Load and Heat Rate. The best way to think of these are maximum temperature and length of time at high temperature. If you come back from orbit at too steep of an angle you get too hot. If you come back too shallow you are hot for too long, or you skip out. In the first case you burn off the wings, in the second case you melt the structure under the thermal protection, in the third case you don't get home.
The Space Shuttle targets an entry that is a balance between heat rate and heat load (called a thermal trade off line). This is why after the Columbia accident they said that they would have had a hard time targeting a more benign entry. If they had come in steeper they would have burned up the tiles, if they had come in shallower they would have melted the wing structure.
As far as X-Prize entries are concerned, they really don't have to worry much about time at temperature because their entries are going to be rathar short. So their thermal protection just has to handle the max temp that they will get due to the aerodynamic heating, which is much less than the heating the Space Shuttle sees during entry.
On another note, the group that I work in (Flight Design and Dynamics) may start looking into moving from our IBM/AIX platform to a Linux platform. Penguins in space! I guess that is a bit offtopic, but oh well.
Animats posted a comment about the problems with the CAVE's corners, while this is noticable, a lot can be done to make it look better. The CAVE software includes corrections that make the images line up at the joints. Its not perfect, but a heck of a lot cheaper than a dome visual.
Most CAVE's have 3 screens and sometimes a floor projection. The new ISU C6 will have screens for all 6 sides of the cube, for total immersion! No its not a Holodeck, but we are getting close!