Article from Wired News (English)

Seneca's dictum "To the stars through great difficulty" seems especially appropriate to this area of endeavor for Linux.

"The team builds suborbital rockets that are smaller than commercial rockets, but larger and more powerful than hobby ones. In addition, the project relies on open-source software and hardware, which can dramatically improve the performance of the rockets...The group's latest rocket, set to launch this September, has an onboard computer comprised of an AMD 586 processor and a Jumptec MOPS/520 PC/104+ board -- basically, a modest 133 MHz PC on a four-by-four inch slab of plastic. There's also a power supply, a PCMCIA card carrier for an 802.11b card to transmit data to the ground, and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage. The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux, with the 2.4.20 Linux kernel."


"...the team uses FSMLab's RTLinux for handling critical real-time tasks in a small, deterministic environment. 'We're all about free software and open hardware,' Greenberg said. 'Everything we do is published on the Net.' "

Links are included in the article to other descriptions of the different projects, as well as pictures of the actual hardware. It's important that this knowledge should be published, as it is likely that further work will be more difficult
as Homeland Security in the US tightens up control in this arena. Although work will continue, it will probably have to be done in countries whose governments do not feel so threatened by terrorism.


Update: One of the rockets is on display at USENIX this week...