a few years ago. As a co-founder of Masten Space Systems I would get this question frequently enough that I wrote a standard blog article about it. Here's the gist:
Work for NASA but leave before it makes you cynical. Work in Mojave but leave or else you’ll never get married. No matter what, build something. Internships! Go to some key conference and meet people Use LinkedIn, VisualCV, and yes, Facebook Know your industry intimately Join Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) Go get an advanced degree. Get it from the International Space University (ISU) if you can Become an expert at something Do something risky Spectacularly fail at something Be LOUD about it!
The materials we buy from Norton are used in test systems, not the final flight vehicles. The ones you see Jon climbing on are used on what we call XA 0.1 which is our first test platform that should be flying in a few weeks. The final commercial flight vehicles will have custom built tanks.
>Then again I wonder if they ever really could get >back to the Apollo days? That seemed the best >balance to me, but would the American public >tolerate several astronauts burning up on the pad >due to pure pressurized oxygen sparking up the >capsule?
Why would you want to back to the Apollo days? That program wasn't sustainable, wasn't oriented toward producing anything that was economically viable and never intended on letting ordinary citizens go. Apollo just produced flags and footprints. I'm not interested unless the end goal is very large numbers of ordinary citizens, not government employees, living, working and making money in space.
RFID tags are just a way of carrying the identifier. The big difference for the supply chain is that RFID creates enough of a desire to upgrade that you can finally get two very important things the supply chain has needed for a long time: serialized identifiers (i.e. this particular case of coke as opposed to a case of coke) and Internet oriented, ad hoc networking in order to send the event data around. So its not that you want tag data, you want data about your product as its flows through the supply chain.
And using IP addresses is a flagrant layer violation. The IETF is already struggling with how to deal with services as opposed to IP addresses as endpoints. The best method is to convert what's in the tag to a domain-name and then lookup services instead of IP addresses.
EPCglobal Network just a set of usage conventions
on
RFID: The Next Internet?
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· Score: 3, Informative
For those trying to understand the EPCglobal Network from those media reports here's the easy primer:
The EPCglobal Network is just a set of usage conventions for existing Internet standards and infrastructure for accessing data about the Electronic Product Code (EPC). RFID tags that adhere to the EPCglobal standards for tag encoding contain EPCs. The standard bar code that's been in use for decades is a degenerative case of an EPC.
The usage conventions include a way of turning that EPC into a domain-name (in much the same way that the ENUM standard provides a way of turning a telephone number into a domain-name). From that point on its really just TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, Web Services, and standard security mechanisms we all know and work with every day.
Yes, there is a large amount of incorrect terminology in that article. Anyone that has talked to a reporter about technical stuff knows that there's no telling what you're going to get on the other end. Suffice it to say, this isn't QueCat, it isn't a "new Internet", and it isn't about reading RFID tags from a distance. The stuff the Foundation is building is useful even if RFID tags were never deployed since it also works with bar codes.
Please be clear here: the standards for the Electronic Product Code (EPC) is different and fairly orthogonal with the Gen2 tag specifications. You can encode an EPC into anything. See http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mealling -epc-urn-00.txt for the documentation on the various ways you can encode an EPC.
That's actually almost exactly what we're doing. The code in the RFID tag is converted into a domain-name that points to a web server (or whatever service you want to publish) that contains the data or services you need to understand the tag.
You'll have to forgive the reporters. They haven't read the technical specs on this stuff so the translations don't capture things like this.
Actually, no. See http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mealling -epc-urn-00.txt which defines the URI type for the EPC (the content of an RFID tag). Essentially the form will be a URI instead of an IP address (see your favorite text on network layering for why that is). The form looks like this:
The point here isn't about the RFID tag itself, its about the identity of the particular product in question. The system is still intended to work with bar codes since you're never really going to get rid of those either. Yes, security is an issue for RFID but that's an orthogonal issue to being able to associate data with the Electronic Product Code (EPC) in a distributed and secure way. Whether or not that EPC came from an RFID tag or some other source is hidden in the lower layers of the network.
Right now data in the supply chain is sent along the same route as the product itself in a daisy chain fashion. If any link in that chain fails or just isn't capable of handling what's going on then you have no visibility beyond that point (a chain is only as a strong as its weakest link). A Discovery Service allows you to find those other places where data about that RFID tag is found by hoping 'over' the bad links in the chain.
Could it possibly be that the reason we can't walk into North Korea as easily as we did Iraq and Afghanistan is that North Korea has a very large "sponsor" that has told the entire world to keep their hands off "or else".
The minute any American crossed the DMZ China would instantly take Taiwan, abolish Hong Kong's parliament, and immediately send troops to defend North Korea.
That doesn't sound like a situation I'd like to start with. Iraq was low hanging fruit. North Korea is as near to the top of the tree as you can get without actually being Russia or China.
If NASA could be trusted with that money and if the request for more money would not doom the entire vision to an early congressional grave, I might agree with you. But given NASA's history and the current political climate I can't see either of those happening. NASA is already making noises about gearing up a Shuttle derived heavy lift component. I'd rather restrict their budget so they can't do that than run the risk of them using larger budgets to do things they shoudln't be doing.
Why the assumption that this has to be a way to fund NASA? If it can raise money let someone do it as a business opportunity. Shouldn't the long term goal be an entire economic system in space based on free enterprise and competition instead of a program that's only run by NASA? If that's the case why are we working so hard to give money to NASA?
Come on Arthur! You should know better!;-) Since when has throwing money at NASA actually helped? This budget is almost identical to the same budget that _built_ Apollo. With the likes of SpaceX, Bigelow and Scaled why should NASA's budget be larger? Especically when this effort gets _all_ of the Shuttle and most of the ISS budgets in 5 or so years.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote this:
http://rocketforge.org/?p=436
a few years ago. As a co-founder of Masten Space Systems I would get this question frequently enough that I wrote a standard blog article about it. Here's the gist:
Work for NASA but leave before it makes you cynical.
Work in Mojave but leave or else you’ll never get married.
No matter what, build something.
Internships!
Go to some key conference and meet people
Use LinkedIn, VisualCV, and yes, Facebook
Know your industry intimately
Join Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS)
Go get an advanced degree. Get it from the International Space University (ISU) if you can
Become an expert at something
Do something risky
Spectacularly fail at something
Be LOUD about it!
The materials we buy from Norton are used in test systems, not the final flight vehicles. The ones you see Jon climbing on are used on what we call XA 0.1 which is our first test platform that should be flying in a few weeks. The final commercial flight vehicles will have custom built tanks.
>Then again I wonder if they ever really could get
>back to the Apollo days? That seemed the best
>balance to me, but would the American public
>tolerate several astronauts burning up on the pad
>due to pure pressurized oxygen sparking up the
>capsule?
Why would you want to back to the Apollo days? That program wasn't sustainable, wasn't oriented toward producing anything that was economically viable and never intended on letting ordinary citizens go. Apollo just produced flags and footprints. I'm not interested unless the end goal is very large numbers of ordinary citizens, not government employees, living, working and making money in space.
RFID tags are just a way of carrying the identifier. The big difference for the supply chain is that RFID creates enough of a desire to upgrade that you can finally get two very important things the supply chain has needed for a long time: serialized identifiers (i.e. this particular case of coke as opposed to a case of coke) and Internet oriented, ad hoc networking in order to send the event data around. So its not that you want tag data, you want data about your product as its flows through the supply chain.
We are using URIs. Please don't try and read a reporter written article as a technical specification. The form we're using is outlined here:g -epc-urn-00.txt and looks something like this:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-meallin
urn:epc:id:sgtin:400700.3456.432123567
And using IP addresses is a flagrant layer violation. The IETF is already struggling with how to deal with services as opposed to IP addresses as endpoints. The best method is to convert what's in the tag to a domain-name and then lookup services instead of IP addresses.
For those trying to understand the EPCglobal Network from those media reports here's the easy primer:
The EPCglobal Network is just a set of usage conventions for existing Internet standards and infrastructure for accessing data about the Electronic Product Code (EPC). RFID tags that adhere to the EPCglobal standards for tag encoding contain EPCs. The standard bar code that's been in use for decades is a degenerative case of an EPC.
The usage conventions include a way of turning that EPC into a domain-name (in much the same way that the ENUM standard provides a way of turning a telephone number into a domain-name). From that point on its really just TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, Web Services, and standard security mechanisms we all know and work with every day.
Yes, there is a large amount of incorrect terminology in that article. Anyone that has talked to a reporter about technical stuff knows that there's no telling what you're going to get on the other end. Suffice it to say, this isn't QueCat, it isn't a "new Internet", and it isn't about reading RFID tags from a distance. The stuff the Foundation is building is useful even if RFID tags were never deployed since it also works with bar codes.
Please be clear here: the standards for the Electronic Product Code (EPC) is different and fairly orthogonal with the Gen2 tag specifications. You can encode an EPC into anything. See http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mealling -epc-urn-00.txt for the documentation on the various ways you can encode an EPC.
That's actually almost exactly what we're doing. The code in the RFID tag is converted into a domain-name that points to a web server (or whatever service you want to publish) that contains the data or services you need to understand the tag.
You'll have to forgive the reporters. They haven't read the technical specs on this stuff so the translations don't capture things like this.
Actually, no. See http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mealling -epc-urn-00.txt which defines the URI type for the EPC (the content of an RFID tag). Essentially the form will be a URI instead of an IP address (see your favorite text on network layering for why that is). The form looks like this:
urn:epc:id:sgtin:40070.345.5497498
The point here isn't about the RFID tag itself, its about the identity of the particular product in question. The system is still intended to work with bar codes since you're never really going to get rid of those either. Yes, security is an issue for RFID but that's an orthogonal issue to being able to associate data with the Electronic Product Code (EPC) in a distributed and secure way. Whether or not that EPC came from an RFID tag or some other source is hidden in the lower layers of the network.
Right now data in the supply chain is sent along the same route as the product itself in a daisy chain fashion. If any link in that chain fails or just isn't capable of handling what's going on then you have no visibility beyond that point (a chain is only as a strong as its weakest link). A Discovery Service allows you to find those other places where data about that RFID tag is found by hoping 'over' the bad links in the chain.
Could it possibly be that the reason we can't walk into North Korea as easily as we did Iraq and Afghanistan is that North Korea has a very large "sponsor" that has told the entire world to keep their hands off "or else".
The minute any American crossed the DMZ China would instantly take Taiwan, abolish Hong Kong's parliament, and immediately send troops to defend North Korea.
That doesn't sound like a situation I'd like to start with. Iraq was low hanging fruit. North Korea is as near to the top of the tree as you can get without actually being Russia or China.
In my spare time I'm the VP for Business Development for Masten Space Systems. Its what keeps me sane....
If NASA could be trusted with that money and if the request for more money would not doom the entire vision to an early congressional grave, I might agree with you. But given NASA's history and the current political climate I can't see either of those happening. NASA is already making noises about gearing up a Shuttle derived heavy lift component. I'd rather restrict their budget so they can't do that than run the risk of them using larger budgets to do things they shoudln't be doing.
Why the assumption that this has to be a way to fund NASA? If it can raise money let someone do it as a business opportunity. Shouldn't the long term goal be an entire economic system in space based on free enterprise and competition instead of a program that's only run by NASA? If that's the case why are we working so hard to give money to NASA?
Come on Arthur! You should know better! ;-) Since when has throwing money at NASA actually helped? This budget is almost identical to the same budget that _built_ Apollo. With the likes of SpaceX, Bigelow and Scaled why should NASA's budget be larger? Especically when this effort gets _all_ of the Shuttle and most of the ISS budgets in 5 or so years.
The Artemis Society figured that it could do a minimal but sustainable lunar base mission for $1.42 billion. $800 million of that being launch costs.
I'm keeping track of press coverage here.