Category Archives: News

Space Shuttle Discovery landing planned on Monday morning 19 Apr

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My most favorite memory of the NASA shuttle program to date was sitting on the roof of my Dallas home watching the shuttle orbiter streak across the sky on it’s way to a landing in Florida.  The florescent trail streamed across the sky as the vehicle pushed through the superheated plama.  I was amazed as I watched the ground track on the televised coverage and knew that inside that fireball were 7 humans returning from their mission in space.

Ground track of Space Shuttle Discovery first landing opportunity on Monday morning 19 Apr.It has been a while since NASA has allowed the public to witness this spectacular sight due to the risk of debris that would fall to the ground in a catastrophic event like the Columbia accident.  After implementing the risk reduction suggestions, it looks like NASA is again allowing the orbiter to reenter over the continental US.  With a clean bill of health after the focus inspection of the heat shield tiles, Discovery was cleared for landing on Monday.

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Progress Report on Open Design/Open Source Hardware Licensing

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One of the pivotal components of Open Design is a set of licenses foropen source hardware (be sure to click through to the PDF) that mirror the ideals underlying the various open source software licenses (and the Creative Commons which has distilled the idea into four traits that combine to form six licenses).  Finding or developing such licenses has been, and continues to be, a major road block for Mach 30.  The good news is that the open source community is thinking about this, too, and there are some licenses to consider.

One promising license is the TAPR Open Hardware License (TAPR OHL), written by John Ackerman (scroll down to read about his NTP servers), a resident of the Dayton area.  He has written an article in the UD Law Review discussing the TAPR OHL from a legal perspective.  In terms of the Creative Commons licensing terms, the TAPR OHL would probably best be described as an “Attribution Share Alike” license, or in software terms a GPL-like license.  There is also a non-commercial “flavor” of the license, that probably maps to the Creative Commons “Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike”.  I am personally very excited by the inclusion of multiple “flavors” of the license, as I think it is important that the Open Design community have the same choices artists and software developers do in the Creative Commons and various open source software licenses.

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