Apr 01
Interesting item pointed out to me today is Project Virgle. Though in many cases, this appears to be an April Fools joke, there are some items that spur much debate.
I have taken the liberty of posting to that group the fact that we, here at Open Nasa, do truly believe in the importance of engagement. The benefits associated with working across many generational, educational, and industrial lines are astounding and I hope that those who read through Project Virgle’s group discussion will visit this site and provide the feedback/opinions/dreams that we hope to integrate into NASA’s Mission.
April 1st, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Another thanks for pointing me in this website’s direction! I’ve been pondering what more gifted minds than mine have come to make of Project Virgle. The idea itself is quite romantic, even if the timeline is (putting it on a level of mildness similar to water) fantastically optimistic. As an amateur writer, I’ve come to draw on things like this and integrate them, expound on them in my work. It’s a bit disheartening to see the reaction given by many; even for a joke, this is a thought provoking subject, and should galvanize interest rather than provoke the amount of internet antics is has attracted.
Personally, I feel it can be done, albeit with an extended timeframe. Heck, I’d volunteer, though what I’d actually be able to contribute is a complete mystery.
April 1st, 2008 at 7:07 pm
[…] http://www.opennasa.com […]
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:24 am
A quote today at time.com from Hashem Bajwa, digital planning director at the San Francisco-based ad agency Goodby, noted the irony of the Google gag saying “It’s not a total disconnect from what Google does. So many people are asking, what will Google do next? If anyone would do it, it would be Google.”
I should start counting the number of times a day Google comes up in conversation at NASA. Google really resonates with a lot of people because they have figured out how to let the “rest of us” explore the universe! First they opened up information. Now, they are busy opening up space through projects like “Google Sky,” a new feature that allows anyone with a computer and Internet connection to “to browse and explore the universe” through the Hubble Space Telescope. Then, of course, there is the “Google Lunar X PRIZE” - for those of us who are really serious about participating. Google is a master at leveraging it’s brand and communication.
Most interesting, I think, is this quote from Google representative Andrew Peterson who dodged the question “Why Mars?” with an answer that sounds pretty familiar to a lot of those in conversations I’ve been party to recently — “Because software engineering isn’t rocket science, producing truly stellar products requires us to boldly innovate where no technology company has innovated before.”
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 am
Ideas for NASA staff and others to consider:
From a paper was first published in the “Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001″: “A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems”
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
“One reason more cooperation on such a library [of manufacturing recipes] hasn’t happened to date is that the various societies people support have (seemingly) very different objectives. For example, numerous space-settlement related efforts (such as SSI http://www.ssi.org/, the Mars Society http://www.marssociety.org, the Living Universe Foundation http://www.luf.org, PERMANENT
http://www.permanent.com, and the Artemis Project http://www.asi.org) each have a different approach towards space settlement. Since so many bright people want similar things, the question arises of how we can work together to help all of these projects develop. Rather than argue whether L5 or Mars or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn should be humankind’s first space settlement, we could be asking what is common between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared.”
The slides for the presentation are here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf
Proposal to NASA a decade ago:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm
“The project’s ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces - individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools - will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone.”
Also: “The Freevolution is happening now as free and open source software methodology is being brought to the design of the physical world.”
http://www.freevolution.net/
Frankly, the biggest thing holding me back is not directly money or time but is simply trying to deal creatively and appropriately with the issue that if I really make something like OSCOMAK and open it up on the web as a collective effort (ala say Wikipedia or Everything2), some security agencies might try to shut it down as a “terrorist” site because someone else will add a design for a box cutter (or whatever) and someone else will then complain that is a tool of terrorism and the site could be providing aid and comfort to terrorists. So our collective fear is keeping us all from a promising future. I hope that issue is resolveable, by using peer-to-peer tools to distribute the liability (i.e. people host their own designs or put them into a usenet/freenet like network), but even with that idea it will probably only be moved forward by taking significant personal risks as a free software and free content author. I have no interest in aiding terrorists or lawbreakers — it is just that you can’t empower all the people without some of them doing bad things. But that empowerment is supposed to be what freedom and democracy and diversity is about.
April 4th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
My first reaction to Project Virgle was to be a little disappointed. As someone working on Ares, I took offense to Google using a manned mission to Mars as part of a joke. Is that how people perceive efforts to send people to the Moon and Mars? One big prank?
I mean I get it; it’s crazy that Google would create a permanent settlement on Mars. They had a similar joke a few years ago about their new campus on the Moon. But there are a lot of people working hard to get us up there, and maybe we need to focus on doing what we can to help instead of cracking jokes.
Then I thought that it’s not out of the realm of possibility to have Google partner with NASA. They’d be a great partner for advanced robotic missions to Mars and the other planets, to asteroids, and even manned missions to the Moon and beyond. They could index the raw data, make it easy to disseminate to scientists and engineers. They could create innovative ways to parse the data, not just for the scientific community but for the regular folks that just want to know what’s up there.
They’ve made a lot of money indexing other peoples’ data. Is it now time to get them to help create new data?