[Ground-station] Call for discussion: ORI satellite program

[Bdale Garbee]

Phil Karn <karn at ka9q.net> writes:

> Yup. The devil is in the details, and the details will bit you. Like red
> caps on rocket engine plumbing. Sigh.

One of the other really serious lessons for me in the P3D / AO-40 was
that you have to be careful about how much you try to wrangle with a
given amount of "process".

What I mean is that I'm pretty confident that Karl could keep the entire
design of an AO-10/13 class spacecraft in mind personally.  But I'm
pretty confident that *nobody* could keep the entire design of an AO-40
class spacecraft in one brain.

This says something both about being careful to choose how much
complexity to bite off, and about the need to choose the right processes
to manage what you decide to build and deliver.

Given my deep history in both AMSAT projects and open source
communities, I'm pretty confident in stating that open source processes
are insufficient by themselves to deliver a functioning spacecraft to
orbit.

But I don't know that this community needs to wrestle with that for a
while, yet.  Get as much cool technical development work done as
possible before you have to engage in the kind of process overheads I
fear will ultimately be necessary to deliver a successful space segment. 

73 - Bdale, KB0G
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