By the time you read this, Space Shuttle Endeavour will be winging its way to the International Space Station on mission STS-123. As millions of people around the world watch live video feeds captured by the Telescience Lab, Fedora will be running the servers that distribute the footage to Houston's Mission Control and NASA TV. In fact, various iterations of Fedora turn up all over Kennedy Space Center, including servers that manage data processing and even the countdown clock.
Open source software in the space program is nothing new. Indeed, NASA manages several open source projects ranging from interactive imagery to a mission simulation toolkit. According to its Web site, the federal organization is motivated to distribute some of its software code to "increase NASA software quality [and] accelerate software development."
NASA is also behind a project named CoLab which, in true open source fashion, presents engineering problems to the public and hopes for a collaborative effort to solve them. From ColLab sprung CosmosCode which is aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for various software to be used during spaceflight.
The use of open source seems to be working well for NASA: in December, 2007, the organization mandated Boeing to use "open source specifications" while building the avionics system that will send the new Ares rockets -- and Orion manned spacecraft -- into orbit beginning in 2014.
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Add CommentBy on Mar. 11, 2008
This is a great article that shows how open source is used in very critical applications, such as the space mission.
NASA has and keeps releasing a number of its software projects under Open Source. Check out http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/ for full listing of applications.
Now we need other state & federal agencies to follow in the NASAs footsteps instead of going with companies that lobby & "contribute" to get their crappy products deployed.
Hopefully the recession will assist in the increased opensource adoption.
That's for sure, ajaxer.
I know the Open Source Software Institute (http://www.oss-institute.org/) works with the Dept of Defense and other government agencies but they mainly focus on security issues. Still... that's something. :-)
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