From Buck and Wernher to Erik Raymond and Linus Torvalds

04/16/03 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

p. In Beyond Buck and Wernher John Carter McKnight suggests that space organizations should move away from their “Buck Rogers dreams and Wernher von Braun tactics for a spacefaring 21st Century” and on to new methods of leadership and management. His suggestion is to use the power of the web of members and their resources to implement concrete projects (not letter writing campaigns or street corner leafletting) in cooperation with universities, local industry, local governmental resources, etc to build out local community of not activism but actual building of space hardware, systems and resources.

p. From my point of view it appears that what he is attempting to articulate is to apply Open Source community and resource management techniques to the space industry. His ideal 'SpaceFaring Web' is essentially identical to the open source communities surrounding projects such as Linux, Apache and myriad other projects that supply almost all of the software that the Internet runs on. The best treatise on Open Source and its rather non-intuitive economics is found in Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. What McKnight is suggesting is that space groups move the entire concept of space out of the cathedral and firmly into the bazaar.

p. While this is an excellent idea (and the original concept behind Rocketforge as an aerospace equivalent to SourceForge and Freshmeat), there are problems to overcome. Open Source works when raw materials are cheap or free. The bazaar is very close to a gift economy. The problem to solve is how to drive down the costs of some of the raw materials that the nascent space bazaar would need. Obviously you can't provide free 6061-T6 aluminum but providing a user friendly and accessible means of finding cheap materials (i.e. things like Online Metals but with better prices). For many the issue isn't materials or time, its lack of real plans. Making components for rocket engines is well within the realm of many vocational school machine shops, what isn't are the plans for building one.

p. The other data point that I have personal experience with is the attempt to do some of this within the Moon Society itself. Within the society we have several teams with specific projects. The In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) team is one example that is very close to what McKnight is talking about. That team is currently moribund due to a) organizer/leader burnout and b) lack of any existing plans to start from. While a few have resource they can apply, a majority simply participate by talking things to death. In order for McKnight's grand Spacefaring Web to emerge there is going to have to be some in depth analysis why it isn't working now, what resources it needs and what parts of the 'bazaar' model apply and which ones don't.

p. One area that would be worth investigating is the various non-traditional aerospace groups such as the Am/Ex rocketry groups (IEAS, ERPS, Armadillo, etc). In many cases these groups are following many Open Source techniques. Most use publicly available plans, enable physically distributed teams using group communications tools, teams with very loose boundaries between projects, etc. In most cases there is a maximum leader (in the bazaar sense, not in the sense that McKnight uses the term). Perhaps something can be bootstrapped by pairing space organizations with local rocketry groups. The combination would probably be a lot more effective. There's nothing like the swoosh of a large rocket to get an space nut's motivation pumping.

p. This is not going to be an easy task. Its a rare thing when Open Source techniques can be applied to something that isn't already a gift economy. But it is worth trying. The Open Source software community is currently building one of the best operating systems around, and is challenging the 'Boeing' of that industry in a way that could shake the entire software industry to its foundations. Its time to shake the aerospace industry the same way.