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Back in early 2011 and before the great crash, there was the Tsiolkovsky Compendium. The purpose was to flesh out in detail a complete reference human mission to Mars, based on Mars Direct / JSC's DRM-3. Progress was made, then a combination of events including said crash and my own newfound responsibilities as a father led to an unfortunate decline of activity and eventual hiatus. Time has passed, but with it has come the advances of SpaceX, Planetary Resources, Mars-One, and Inspiration Mars. In this context I believe the compendium project to be more relevant than ever.
With your help, I would like to restart and finish this great work. The goal of the project is to create two reference mission architectures, which I am tentatively naming M-4 and M-100:
M-4 has basically the same design requirements as Mars Direct, and both Mars Direct and NASA/JSC's third Design Reference Mission (DRM-3) will provide the initial starting points for this mission profile. It will be a conjunction-class mission with a crew of four, a stay of 18 months on the surface, ISRU propellant production for the return trip, and modest but safe equipment lifespans. An M-4 exploration programme would consist of a new mission launched at each window of opportunity until such time that Mars is adequately explored to provide context for the M-100 site selections.
M-100 is a permanent settlement expedition, sending enough people and equipment to build a permanent human settlement and industrial base on Mars. Demonstrable 100% self-sufficiency is the design requirement of this reference mission profile, including dwelling and equipment construction from in-situ resources. (M-100 is a literary allusion to the “first 100” of Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars trilogy, but that is all - there is no reason to assume that the actual mission crew size or any aspect of the mission profile will match that described in Robinson's stories.)
Let me be clear: the goal of this project is not yet another paper study and powerpoint slide set. Rather, we are seeking to construct a bill of materials and set of blueprints ready to be machined, rigorous tests and simulations of the equipment and mission profile, operating manuals for all participants, and detailed risk analysis and mitigation strategies.
The key to this project is understanding how we can leverage the thinking and knowledge of 10's of thousands of people (or more) to collectively work for a shared common goal of significant complexity, and to coordinate and collaborate on that scale in a way that creates incredible outcomes.
Is this a huge undertaking? Yes. In part this is an experiment in testing the limits of volunteer projects. However projects of this size are not unheard of: the Linux kernel is probably of similar complexity, having 15 million lines of code and an estimated cost to re-create in the billions of U.S. dollars.
Not long ago I was a contractor at NASA-Ames Research Center, where I worked alongside individuals who contributed to the original NASA design reference mission and the robotic exploration rovers. I will do what I can to call on that social network to provide hard-earned wisdom about Mars mission engineering. I am now a professional open-source software developer, working on a project with 500 contributors and over ten thousand stakeholders. I have experience managing open source software development at scale, and will transfer that experience to coordinating this new open hardware project.
This thread will be the starting point: please post questions and discussion points. In the weeks to come I will setup a dedicated wikispace & mailing list, source code repository, and other coordination/collaboration tools. Please consider joining me in the great endeavor!
Ad astra,
Mark Friedenbach
Last edited by Mark Friedenbach (2013-06-18 16:24:02)
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a) Have you had a chat with Mars One about working with them?
b) How do you plan to make sure that everyone who has access to the project is a U.S. citizen (or not a U.S. Citizen if this is a non-US project)?
c) Would this be governed by the Mars Society or similar if Mars One is keeping everything internal?
Come on to the Future
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a) Have you had a chat with Mars One about working with them?
I will, and hopefully they will choose to collaborate. But contributing to or using an open-source effort would mean giving up design and patent rights otherwise held by them or their contractors, so don't hold your breath.
b) How do you plan to make sure that everyone who has access to the project is a U.S. citizen (or not a U.S. Citizen if this is a non-US project)?
Why would that be necessary? If you're talking about ITAR compliance, that's way, way overkill. What's the issue?
c) Would this be governed by the Mars Society or similar if Mars One is keeping everything internal?
It's completely separate from both organizations, although I welcome collaboration with either. I'm in the process of setting up a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit to be the legal steward of the IP rights and to provide supporting services such as virtual workshops and conferences further down the line (modeled after the Python Software Foundation).
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I would certainly be willing to aid in whatever way I can. What format would you use for intellectual property? CC, GNU, traditional copyright?
Further, would you do M-4 first, then M-100, or do them concurrently? What kind of guidelines would be set with regards to mission architectures?
Edit: I am at the moment working on a rather closely related project of my own, regarding the development of a robust space infrastructure to support extensive colonization efforts in an economical way. It is very much complementary to a revived Tsiolkovsky Compendium.
-Josh
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idiom wrote:b) How do you plan to make sure that everyone who has access to the project is a U.S. citizen (or not a U.S. Citizen if this is a non-US project)?
Why would that be necessary? If you're talking about ITAR compliance, that's way, way overkill. What's the issue?
Earlier...
we are seeking to construct a bill of materials and set of blueprints ready to be machined,
I imagine this might be subject to export restrictions. Especially if it included software.
Come on to the Future
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I would certainly be willing to aid in whatever way I can. What format would you use for intellectual property? CC, GNU, traditional copyright?
CERN has an open hardware license that in principle is similar to the GPL - it's a bit of an tenuous stretch to use software (GPL) or artistic (CC) licenses for hardware projects. However even having said that, I am personally more comfortable with using GPLv3+ instead, as it is a much better understood and legally tested license, provides the necessary copyright, design, and patent releases, allows commercial use of manufactured hardware, is widely used in the open-hardware community, etc.
But part of why I'm starting a foundation is so that it can retain the legal standing necessary to enforce the copyright, patent, and design claims which give the license legal weight, and to allow us to switch licenses or cross-license in the future without having to get the permission of every contributor. So to an extent the choice right now doesn't matter too much.
Further, would you do M-4 first, then M-100, or do them concurrently?
It's really not my decision, but almost certainly they'd be worked on concurrently. It's an open-source / crowd-sourced project, so people contribute what they can to whatever portion of whichever project interests them. Maybe gardening is their hobby so they get involved in the greenhouse project, or maybe they are an architect and want to take a stab at designing Martian living spaces. In either case the work they do would be applicable to either the M-4 or M-100 mission profile.
Another way to think about it is that the vast majority of the work required is not specific to a particular mission, although there will be a few people who concern themselves with making sure the parts assemble within the mass and space budgets of the M-4 or M-100 baseline profile.
This is an open-hardware project. We are not designing an actual mission, but rather a hypothetical mission profile. That baseline profile is then customized by industry or government to suit their own purposes, allowing specific missions to be launched at low cost since only the mission-specific tweaks need to be made, and with economies of scale due to shared components.
And honestly, I don't see the Compendium being constrained to the mission profiles I described. Rather I would like to eventually see open-hardware designs for O'Neil colonies, domed cities on the Moon, asteroid prospecting missions, etc. It's just that I believe the M-4 and M-100 missions are much easier to explain and rally people behind.
M-4 is “send 4 human beings and their science equipment to the surface of Mars, and return them safely home.” M-100 is “establish permanent, self-sufficient human habitation on another world.” I think these two reference projects are simple enough to be easily explained and understood by the general populous, yet compelling enough to attract wide-spread public participation, and general enough to be used in practice as a basis for a variety of actual mission profiles.
What kind of guidelines would be set with regards to mission architectures?
I will set none as I am not dictator of this project. However I hope to work with anyone here who is interested in creating a manifesto both explaining the rationale of the project and providing a baseline set of requirements with justifications. None of it will be set in stone, however, as I hope that we will follow the bottom-up development by consensus mechanism that has worked so well in the open source software world.
Edit: I am at the moment working on a rather closely related project of my own, regarding the development of a robust space infrastructure to support extensive colonization efforts in an economical way. It is very much complementary to a revived Tsiolkovsky Compendium.
We're off topic, but I would love to hear more about what you're working on. I too am working on other projects focused on the economics of space development in cislunar space and NEOs.
Mark Friedenbach wrote:we are seeking to construct a bill of materials and set of blueprints ready to be machined,
I imagine this might be subject to export restrictions. Especially if it included software.
Ah, you're making assumptions about what kind of software. Most of the software written will be simulation & validation work, not flight software. And of the software that actually sees use in the mission, most of the original stuff would have to do with the various gadgets and environmental controls, greenhouse automation, the rover, science lab, Mars habitation module, etc. It's not at all obvious any of that would fall under ITAR regulations.
But even so, some small parts of it might be. In those cases there may end up having to be some compartmentalization, such as having those parts be contributed by non-U.S. persons and not fully integrated with the rest of the project, or otherwise exploiting some legal loophole to maintain compliance. This is similar to how PGP was developed in the 90's, when cryptography was on the U.S. munitions list. There might also be ways to avoid such classification such as the recently created executive branch waiver.
But really, we'd have to be very successful to get far enough that ITAR is a serious problem. Until then, it's not worth worrying about. ITAR is killing American competitiveness, and this is getting recognized at the political level. By the time we encroach on ITAR territory, the situation with non-military applications will probably be very different. But even if it isn't, there are ways we can deal with that.
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Well, just make sure that you make it known when the project begins because I'd love to participate.
Edit: I'd also just like to point out that while a foundation might have the legal right to distribute the IP in any way that it wishes, close consultation with all contributors should still be a matter of policy and common courtesy.
-Josh
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It's already begun! For sure I'll be busy in the next couple of weeks setting up wiki spaces, code repositories, mailing lists, and the foundation itself. But you shouldn't wait for that to add your contribution - it'd be sufficiently on-topic to use the NewMars forum or IRC channel to discuss the project, I think. I'd be very interested to hear your contributions (this thread is fine, or another one if you think it appropriate).
Regarding the Foundation, IP, and common courtesy: that goes without saying. There's two things worth pointing out: (1) copyleft licenses can't be revoked - if you contribute while the project is GPL, then the foundation relicenses under something you don't like, you are free to fork and continue development on the GPL branch; (2) the Foundation would only relicense the project if doing so closes legal loopholes, thereby restoring the intent of the original license. An example would be relicensing to a newer GPL version if/when the FSF updates it, or switching to a specifically open-hardware version if the GPL if/when such a thing is developed.
Last edited by Mark Friedenbach (2013-06-19 12:25:04)
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On the topic of ITAR, it looks like non-military spacecraft systems will be taken off the munitions list (fingers crossed):
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