[Ground-station] Sounding Rockets and FPGAs - at a University

[Leffke, Zachary]

Hi Michelle,
Good questions, and definitely need to clarify a few points.  Again, normal disclaimer of this is just my perspective (and apologies again for long winded emails, I care!).

Short(er) version first, with direct answers (in red) to Michele’s questions:
I think this means we have to look like, or comply with the requirements of, sponsored research from the commercial sector - in order to get any student time at all? Not necessarily, it’s a matter of specific objectives, scope, specific personalities involved, and managing expectations at both sides.  I was just offering ‘sponsored research’ as way to have more of a guaranteed return on investment, via more formal relationships than a $0 MOU (with lots of VT heavy examples, due to my obvious bias, but this might also be useful for contracting services from other groups as well).  This is one way to get guaranteed ‘research faculty time and attention on your project’ which can be a ‘force multiplier’ of sorts in terms of student engagement in addition to actually doing professional grade work.

The people responsible for the GEO effort a few years ago are at ORI. Yup!

We've grown since then, and added expertise, raised 5x the funding, and have results. Agreed!  Sort of linked with your last question below (for added context to what follows) VT doesn’t have to be the ‘only’ partner for large scope missions (like GEO).  An ORI lead effort, where those results from the dedicated volunteers can be leveraged, with VT maybe taking on things like systems engineering for a specific vehicle/platform, dealing with launch constraints and launch vehicle integration, payload integration, fabrication, testing, would certainly be a decent way to go.  I personally want to do more ‘RF and comms stuff’, but if that work went to some other university and we just did the ‘other AOE type stuff’ that has to get done for a full mission, then very well!  This also doesn’t have to be all ‘ORI’ funding situation either, VT (and other universities, formally engaged) can add a ‘flavor’ to proposals to other groups to drum up more $$ support, either in the form of sub-contractors to ORI or as co-PIs.  One might Argue that MORE universities in the mix makes for stronger ‘joint proposals.’

The donation you describe - is this the $100,000 paid to Millenium Space Systems for the engineering review? That worked, because the design was (and is, in its present form) useful and of high quality. It was not a surprise that it passed the review. No.  $100k to MSS came from AMSAT and was not a donation to them, and was not what I was referring to.  That was an engineering fee to support the study to determine if MSS/Air Force increased mission scope to include a secondary Amateur Radio payload would that payload represent a potential negative impact to the primary Air Force mission.  I’m talking of a separate donation to VT from a specific donor (FA) that funded our research faculty time commitment, and the grad students/undergrads involved, to actually develop the PDR level design under the MSS constraints, to engage with MSS to support their study and make them confident we would be ‘no impact’.  We designed in parallel with learning/understanding the constraints of their system/mission in order to essentially tailor the design to a ‘no impact to primary mission’ result.  And that was only the ‘initial’ result…..had the program continued there were a lot more ‘gates’ to get through that we were prepared to tackle, (like getting to CDR, passing subsystem tests, integration tests, flight readiness reviews, etc……essentially ‘proving’ that we would be ‘no impact’).

Was this engineering study the only work product? I would argue no.  Two primary results (maybe three, and then a 4th for VT).  1) The MSS design study, and the approval from them/Air Force to fly (I think demonstrating this is huge, and harkens back to early OSCARs on NRO launch vehicles).  2) the actual PDR-level design. 3) all the excitement, effort, and commitment from so many folks involved lead to the founding of ORI, woot! (not one of the original goals, but I would argue still a useful end result).  4) Tack on to that, a LOT of student (and faculty) experience was gained from that effort (its valuable to us for a student to hear what a company, gov’t group, or other customer might ask questions about during a review process….similar to, but also somehow very different from what might be asked during a Master’s defense), leading to internships and employment based on efforts during that work (but that’s understandably more important to VT than maybe to ORI/AMSAT….again, clarity in our institutional goals I think is key to future success….we for example will ALWAYS have a baked in student focused bias for anything we engage on, big or small, sponsored or under $0 MOU).

If so, then is it fair to say that we have to come up with a lot more funding in order to work with VT? Depends on what we are talking about, but again, not necessarily.  If we are talking about GEO level end goals, and you want professional engineers (research faculty, with student support) adapting the PDR-level design to say a NOAA GOES satellite, carrying through to CDR, to Flight Readiness, to Integration, etc. and working with ORI volunteers to take their work and integrate it into the system, and you don’t want to tolerate ‘more than normal’ program risk for such a mission, etc. etc. than yeah that might require significant funding.  That doesn’t mean ORI has to ‘come up with the money’ though.  I think we would be willing to work with ORI for such an effort to drum up the money via other funding sources (maybe ARDC, maybe NSF/NASA, or any number of groups).  Remember we only got to PDR with that design……so moving on to CDR and beyond for a specific flight would take some doing, and for the WFOV/GEO mission there was the small detail of coming up with $5 million to defray launch costs (may not be a requirement for other future GEO efforts, but $5 million to get to GEO is arguably ‘very cheap’, especially for a system where the secondary payload doesn’t have to manage the overall platform’s health, staying inside a ‘geo box’, worrying about deorbit/graveyard orbit and other SSA concerns, etc.).  So I would state it more like: ‘The VT/ORI team would have to come up with plans for more funding for ambitious joint efforts” (like GEO, and ‘VT/ORI team’ could be modified to include a lot of other groups).  If on the other hand we are talking about smaller focused efforts, on specific tasks, some funding would certainly help research faculty stay engaged more and serve as ‘force multipliers’ for ORI.  And if ORI is willing to accept significant risk, we volunteer our free time as often as we can to supervise student projects…..that’s more of a risk though in that we might have to sacrifice focus there in the interest of the sponsored programs that ‘pay the bills’.  I think they key is being open, honest, and transparent with each other about expectations.

Finally, everything I just talked about is related to keeping faculty engaged on ORI related projects (because that’s where my bias lies in terms of ‘getting stuff done’, and why I keep caveating with ‘my two cents’ and IMHO phrases)…….there are other ways to engage with the University at levels that are well above my pay grade, but could represent significant value to both groups…..I don’t REALLY know what I’m talking about here, but maybe one over simplified example of what I’m trying to express is ‘launch opportunities.’  As a second example, ITAR and sometimes even classified stuff may still be a thing ORI has to confront if they want to keep all options open, and Universities (not just VT, but we’re on the list too) might be positioned to help……As an example where both of those two things come together:  CalPoly for example handles smallsat integration on NRO launch vehicles, AMSAT launched FOX-1A on an NRO vehicle, no AMSAT volunteer on that project had to get a clearance, they got their seat through ElaNa and somethings did happen behind closed doors…but the Fox-1A plans are all published.  Other opportunities might require that kind of flavor (like secondary payloads on Air Force satellites)……….(again I’m probably over simplifying this, which is why I say its above my pay grade…..but the opportunities are there).


All of the above was the ‘short version’.  Keep reading if still interested (and still awake, thanks to all that made it this far).


1.       To get student time at all question.  This does NOT necessarily require funding all the time (from a VT point of view).  We advise projects all the time on a volunteer basis, and sometimes we have overhead funds that can support faculty time (kind of like IRAD funds).  What is DOES mean is that expectations need to be managed on both sides and the level of ‘control’ from an ORI perspective might not be the same as can be expected from something like a sponsored research program (where they would be treated like a formal ‘customer’).  It also means the specific individuals involved and their ability to ‘commit’ needs to be at least discussed up front (along with all the grand ideas)…..I for example am guilty of being very eager to say ‘yes’ to a project, especially if it is specifically RF focused, regardless of other commitments on my time (which is NOT a good time management thing, and can lead to less than spectacular results, despite my initial optimism).  Other colleagues of mine are typically better (IMHO) about when to say yes or no to taking something on as volunteer effort.  Point is, ‘personalities’ and specific rank within the university and ability to control one’s own schedule need to be factored into go/go no decisions.  There is also the semesterly ‘cycle’ that needs to be factored in for the overall schedule, particularly if we want to set up something like a course credit project for students (this also applies to sponsored programs though).  This is all in contrast to sponsored research where you can expected hard deliverables and better overall program management and tracking of the project.

2.       If ORI had a structure that could formally sponsor funded research efforts, that might make it easier to ‘own the work’.  If ORI then elects to publish all that work, or makes publication a requirement of the work (or posting code via Github as a contract deliverable, etc.), they certainly would have that power.  As a University, I don’t think you would have any arguments from us on that front, students and faculty need to publish (there is some nuance there though, if using proprietary IP cores on FPGAs as just one example, that might have some constraints we can’t get out of).  I’m no contracting expert, but formal ‘sponsored research’ comes with a lot of overhead for the folks spending the money (right, you would essentially be paying for my salary, health insurance, university gets a cut to put in their coffers, etc. etc.).  There are other mechanisms, that short circuit that (like donations) but those also come with tradeoffs (like you can’t put ‘deliverables’ on a donation…..but again, ways around that one….we can choose to ‘deliver’ things on our own, give credit/thanks to the donor that sponsored the effort, and get things out in the world for all to see/use…….much like publications coming out of academic grants).  Whether that’s worth the effort is a strategy question for ORI.

3.       The donation I was referring to is NOT the MSS $100k.  AMSAT-NA paid $100k to MSS for the design study, not to VT.  A separate donor paid significant $$ to VT for the actual design/integration work.  I think roughly $50k-$100k, but am not 100% sure, again I never actually charged to that fund and volunteered my time to make room for other research faculty and students.  The VT money was through a donation to the VT Foundation, which is more like a grant, not a contract, which is why ‘legally’ we could do whatever we wanted and didn’t have a formal customer, but what we actually did was treat AMSAT as a ‘customer’, and got the $0 MOU in place between AMSAT/VT to solidify that, so that AMSAT would be confident they weren’t wasting a $100k to MSS, and the donor would be confident they weren’t wasting their money to VT.  Essentially, the pots of money were for the same thing at two organizations, professional engineers tackling the problem.  The money to MSS was so that their engineers could take the time to consider the impact of such a ‘secondary payload’ to the overall Air Force mission and to work with us (right, we asked them to increase overall mission scope, which requires risk analysis, engineering support, etc.).  The money to VT was so that our research faculty could work on the problems as well with focused effort leading toward a PDR level design (with significant student support), meaning GEO goals were part of our daily work load (and not a side project).  The difference from this to #1 above is that faculty were the LEAD researchers with students supporting/learning by doing, rather than #1 above where its more like students are the lead researchers, with faculty just advising from the side (due to time constraints).  The success of the FalconSAT program out of the Air Force Academy is a similar example, that’s mostly full time faculty (including something like 5 full time research faculty, in addition to the academic faculty) driving the train and retaining the ‘institutional knowledge’ with students along for the ride.

4.       The two major outcomes (in my opinion) were 1) Approval from Air Force, (because MSS, the bus manufacturer and lead integrator for the overall mission, approved) to fly an Amateur Radio secondary payload on an Air Force GEO bird and 2) a PDR level design for an Amateur GEO payload based on the AstroSDR.

a.       To be clear, when we started the GEO effort, we did not have an actual completed design that we just had to ‘fit to their bus.’  We started with a lot of ideas and possibilities, and then crystallized all of that down into a PDR-level design that was likely to be approved by MSS and by extension the Air Force.  For those not directly involved, the final ‘moment’ that actually mattered was when Millennium Space Systems was conducting a review with the Air Force (much much further along than PDR for their mission), and advocated on our behalf that an Amateur Radio Secondary payload, added to the mission ot this stage, would provide ‘no impact’ to the primary Air Force mission……we were invited to that call as a courtesy and spoke 0 words……later we got feedback from the Air Force (via MSS) that their response was essentially ‘agreed.’……..With that approval in hand, we then held a separate PDR-level review with AMSAT where the customers were essentially Marc Franco, Michelle, Jerry Buxton, and Barry Baines (and a few others, like Mike Parker from Rincon was there) where we presented all the gory details of the design that was approved to fly (which, hopefully, should not have had any major surprises given how involved they all were).

b.       We were designing in parallel to the MSS study and working with them to tailor the design and mission objectives/requirements based on their specific constraints for their specific vehicle (like DC power budget, thermal management, EMI management, etc.).  VT as an organization, had no problems signing NDAs for access to Rincon proprietary info, dealing with ITAR issues related to the vehicle itself and the Air Force mission, etc. and handling all of that documentation and other material on gov’t approved IT systems (something that might be a harder pill to swallow for ORI/AMSAT volunteers, though a lot of that may have changed with the ORI CJ recent work).  We learned a lot in that process, and the design can certainly be adapted if other opportunities present themselves (not glued to an MSS vehicle).

c.       One could argue (from the hindsight perspective) that the AMSAT money got goal #1 and the VT donation got goal #2.  In reality, not quite that clean, both were needed to be successful, and at lot more support for the overall project came in various forms from multiple organizations including ARRL and FEMA, and multiple volunteers.  Also to be clear, it wasn’t ‘ALL VT’ for major outcome #2…… Rincon donated the prototype AstroSDR (and would have provided the flight unit), and Mike Parker shook loose IRAD dollars so that their engineers could train us up and provide engineering support.  Ettus Research donated hardware for ground testing.  Marc Franco for was a HUGE supporter in terms of his volunteer time and student mentorship for a VT grad student working on the overall RF front end design (which included a low element count phased array concept so that we could steer the beam as the vehicle potentially maneuvered its attitude, we scheduled update calls with him around his lunch break at his day job).  Michelle of course was another Huge supporter for defining the mission objectives and overall concept, including the Air Interface (which was completely open and free of ITAR/Proprietary restrictions), Jerry Buxton represented AMSAT (our customer) and we had help from many other AMSAT volunteers for areas like control concepts, and reset receivers, etc. etc.… Tons of other examples here, point is, it was team effort.

d.       Another ‘benefit’ IMHO is understanding how (and demonstrating that) a University that’s at least a tiny spec of a small part of a corner of the defense and intelligence community (in this specific example, VT and the Hume Center, but this could apply to many universities), can help divvy up the responsibilities related to security/ITAR/ etc. and carve that out from the Open amateur radio goals….the value to ORI/AMSAT of this is a potentially wider range of launch possibilities / vehicles and a framework for handling that kind of material (and again, doesn’t have to be VT….Bob Bruninga at the Naval Academy is another example, and I’m sure there are other examples).  The ORI CJ recent efforts will go a long way to alleviate a lot of those troubles, particularly with cubesats/smallsats, but there may be cases/opportunities where things are still proprietary, ITAR, or even classified, and Universities with the right infrastructure (and willingness to deal with those burdens) can help there.  I occasionally see opportunities for more ‘exotic’ orbits, like GTO and HEO, cross my inbox that I would love to partner with ORI/AMSAT on to get something into those orbits, but usually those opportunities come with ‘strings attached’ where the Amateur payload would be secondary to some primary defense/intel mission, likely some kind of tech demo to burn down risk for a widget destined for greater things one day…….I could see opportunities there though where we can get something done for our sponsors while simultaneously serving ORI and Amateur Radio goals.

So no, you don’t need a lot more funding to work with VT, but we need to be clear about the kind of work we are engaged on and manage expectations.  If you want DVB-S2X implemented on a Xynq platform, and all published as Open Source, maybe wrapped in RFNoC or OpenCPI style frameworks and published on Github…..I would not expect a 1 semester undergrad, loosely supervised by a research faculty member in their free time to get that done.  That has a much better chance working if we find the right grad student focused on DSP/FPGA for their Master’s though, and funded through an ORI (or similar) grant/contract, with the right faculty advisor.  That work would also fit under a ‘sponsored research’ framework, where our actual FPGA experts (research faculty) could spend real time on the problem (perhaps with grad student support).  To be clear, just using the DVB-S2X on an FPGA project as one example, there are lots of other areas where this could apply as well.

We could also PARTNER to go after funding together, like say in a joint proposal to NSF or NASA proposal or maybe a DURIP (which for those who aren’t familiar, DURIPs are Defense University Research Instrumentation Programs, where we can get DoD to sponsor purchases of equipment that might be relevant to their research domains, but a University needs to be involved for that among many other requirements).  I work with a PI who loves to say that NSF ‘prefers to equally underfund everyone so they don’t have any appearance of bias and to keep everyone equally frustrated with them’….which to put a more positive spin on that, an ORI lead (as the PI institution) multi-university effort (with say 4 or 5 different universities as Co-PI institutions, doing different parts of the project, and bringing their students to the table, which NSF likes) might actually have a decent chance of getting NSF funded (so long as we have a solid science case of course).

That’s all for now! Thanks to the readers that made it this far down! I really do appreciate folks taking the time to listen to my opinions on this topic.

-Zach, KJ4QLP
--
Research Associate
Aerospace & Ocean Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305

From: Michelle Thompson <mountain.michelle at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 7, 2021 1:55 PM
To: Leffke, Zachary <zleffke at vt.edu>
Cc: ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute
Subject: Re: [Ground-station] Sounding Rockets and FPGAs - at a University

Thank you Zach, I appreciate the articulate explanation.

I think this means we have to look like, or comply with the requirements of, sponsored research from the commercial sector - in order to get any student time at all?

The people responsible for the GEO effort a few years ago are at ORI.

We've grown since then, and added expertise, raised 5x the funding, and have results.

The donation you describe - is this the $100,000 paid to Millenium Space Systems for the engineering review? That worked, because the design was (and is, in its present form) useful and of high quality. It was not a surprise that it passed the review.

Was this engineering study the only work product?

If so, then is it fair to say that we have to come up with a lot more funding in order to work with VT?

-Michelle W5NYV



On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 9:29 AM Leffke, Zachary via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>> wrote:
Had a sec to get this out and offer my two cents:

Short Version (if you can believe it):  A lot of the faculty that engage with (or would like to engage with) ORI at VT are ‘Research Faculty’ meaning our salaries and our time spent comes from research contract dollars and we don’t get any (or at least very little) funding from the university itself (0% of my salary comes from student tuition).  This means we have to ‘pay the bills’ and have very little time for side projects.  We also have to spend a portion of our time on ‘business development’ and for those that are willing, volunteering time for student project advising or new concepts of interest to us.  I for example also am working on a Telescope program for SSA research, low cost phased arrays for various projects, helping on this year’s undergrad sounding rocket program, and various collections of ad hoc student advising related to cyber physical security for aviation systems (Active duty Army cyber officer’s Master’s thesis), HF comms for military (ROTC/Cadet project), and helping an AOE/ECE senior design team design and test a prototype ‘VT built’ deployable UHF antenna for cubesats to name a few…..all currently ‘unfunded’.  My point is, I stay busy (and those are just my personal examples, a lot of our research faculty do the same thing...one of my colleagues is rebooting High Altitude Ballooning as a ‘regular thing’ at VT, and is the new advisor to our Ham Radio club, VTARA aka K4KDJ that took over for Bob when he retired).  The students do the same thing and volunteer nights and weekends frequently on projects of interest to them.  Those volunteer efforts are in addition to our sponsored research programs that are ‘100%’ of our work day.  If we can structure project efforts like ‘sponsored research’ and there is actual funding for research faculty time and student time (as undergrad wage researchers and/or graduate research assistants) than we can actually charge a percentage of our time to the project and focus.  This also gets senior University ‘management’ off our backs, because at the end of the day, they are looking at bottom dollar ‘research expenditure’ numbers (from the university’s perspective, its our ACADEMIC departments that are responsible for student engagement/development, and the RESEARCH groups might engage with students which is all well and good, but they want to see research dollars moving through the university).  Moving ORI projects from the ‘volunteer time’ category to the ‘sponsored research’ category will go a long way to ‘getting real work done.’  Having to bid/compete for work, student internships, etc. are all fair game and part of our ‘normal business’ operations.  Having hard deadlines, contract deliverables, reviews, reports, etc. are all good things that keep us focused on the task at hand (so long as there is appropriate funding to support working towards those goals).  I’m not saying that ORI or ARDC specifically needs to cough up money, and we can partner together on larger efforts/proposals to get the funding (like the NSF dollars Michelle mentioned, or possible DURIP style efforts), but that would need to fit in the framework of our business development efforts where we asses things like ‘probability of win’ (where NSF and DARPA for example are notoriously low Pwin historically) to make sure its worth the time invested to go after the work.

Oversimplified summary:  Money talks, and if we can fund our time (research faculty and students) to focus on research topics where ORI is the ‘customer’ (or partner for larger efforts) there will be significantly larger return on investment compared to volunteer side project efforts (where you are effectively banking on the supervisor ‘caring’ about your project and having available time).

That’s my quick two cents (maybe obvious), keep reading for longer version, with an example at the end of ‘what worked’ from a partnership perspective:

Maybe obvious, but one item I’ll go ahead and mention for the ‘what works’ column is funding.  For those that don’t know me I am ‘Research Faculty’ at VT and work in a Research Center called the Hume Center, which is very different organizationally than academic or tenure track faculty.  For me (and I suspect many others) we are ‘soft money’ researchers meaning we are funded almost entirely by research contracts (and occasionally grants) which we refer to a ‘sponsored research’.  This is in contrast to academic faculty that are ‘hard money’ funded through the University directly (for example, 0% of my salary comes from student tuition dollars).  These contracts come with deadlines, deliverables, reviews, and occasionally published papers (that we aren’t paid for but is an important thing for academia, particularly our grad students) and is very different than most ‘academic grants’ that come with few strings attached.  We bill according to ‘Level of Effort’ which boils down to what percentage of our time we spend on the various programs.

What this ultimately means is that we have very little time for ‘side projects’ because we are constantly under the gun to meet the contract deliverables.  For me personally, most of my ‘student supervision’ time is volunteer and I spend a lot of nights and weekends trying to work on new research areas that are not currently funded.  All of the sounding rocket work I’ve done (and commented on this list about in the past) was all volunteer effort for me personally (yes it’s a NASA program, managed through Colorado Space Grant, and the students have a budget from various non-NASA sponsors to buy our seat on the rocket and the payload components, but my time for involvement is 0% funded).

The point of the above is to say, in order to get ‘real work’ done, the best way to get focused attention is to turn it into a ‘sponsored research’ style program.  We can try supervising the occasional ‘side project’ (like supervising an undergrad or two who might be doing an independent study to analyze a particular problem), but it will always be a ‘side project’ if its unfunded and our attention will be subject to the ebb and flow of the sponsored programs deliverables that actually pay the bills.  This is why I like Bruce’s comments/suggestions about ORI flipping things around and ‘owning’ the process.  If we have funding to supervise specific research sponsored by ORI (perhaps funded by ARDC grants, or other sources like NSF, etc.) we can treat it like a sponsored research program, and actually focus faculty time on it.  Meeting deadlines, doing reviews, etc. are all GOOD pressure that keep us engaged.  Making the process competitive is also good, and we are totally fine having to ‘compete’ for work through research proposals and such.  If ORI put out something akin to an RFI/RFP that we then had to bid for, that would fit right in with our ‘normal business’.  The contracting part of it (which I am NOT an expert in) can be handled a couple ways, some of which offer more ‘bang for the buck’ for the sponsor (grants through the VT Foundation for example).  We can also act as partners with ORI and propose for other projects where the shape of things might look like ORI as the prime contractor with VT as a sub-contractor, or with both acting as ‘equal partners’ would just depend on what we were proposing and to who.

As an example, there was the GEO effort a few years back with AMSAT-NA (there is a lot to potentially discuss here, but I’m focusing on the ‘getting stuff done’ partnership side of things, not the mission itself).  In that scenario, we received a donation with the ultimate goal of getting approval to fly an Amateur payload on an experimental Air Force satellite.  We used the donation to fund research faculty member time (although technically, all of my personal time on GEO was volunteer effort…I never charged to that fund) and student time (as wage researchers / graduate research assistants) to actually work directly with the Air Force and the satellite manufacturer (Millennium).  The team was very diverse in that we had RF engineers, electrical engineers (focusing on things like power), AOE/ME folks (doing mechanical/thermal/launch analyses), systems engineers, etc.  We had weekly meetings with the Air Force and AMSAT as well as internal meetings for design work, had to navigate the restricted/unrestricted nature of the project (some stuff ITAR because its Air Force, some stuff proprietary because its Millennium), lots of systems engineering work, did thermal, mechanical, and electrical work, RF And comms work with AMSAT (mostly Michelle, Marc Franco, Jerry Buxton, and Mike Parker at Rincon that donated the AstroSDR that was the core of the design) on the Air interface side of things (all public info), had multiple reviews, attended conferences to talk about the project and drum up support (GNU Radio and AMSAT Symposium)…….ultimately resulting in approval to build a payload that met all of the interface requirements to a level approved by the Air Force and a PDR level design (we were even to the point of talking integration schedules and when people would travel from Va to Ca to integrate the payload).  We had to answer to AMSAT (a 501-C3, although not legally, we had a $0 MOU in place, but obviously AMSAT is the ‘customer’ in this case from VT’s perspective), the Air Force (US Gov’t / DoD), Millennium Space Systems (company), and Rincon Research .  In that case we were successful because of the funding.  That was a fairly large effort with lots of organizational complexities, but from my point of view it worked really well because there was funding (thanks entirely to the donor) for our folks to focus on the task at hand.  Obviously the overall program didn’t pan out (for reasons I would argue were outside of AMSAT / VT’s control….different conversation), but for the specific task we were paid for (PDR design, get the thumbs up from AF/MSS), we were successful.

As always, my two cents on the topic (other VT folks might have different perspectives).

-Zach, KJ4QLP
--
Research Associate
Aerospace & Ocean Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305

From: Ground-Station <ground-station-bounces at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station-bounces at lists.openresearch.institute>> On Behalf Of Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 3:33 PM
To: Thomas Savarino <thomas.savarino at mac.com<mailto:thomas.savarino at mac.com>>
Cc: Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>>
Subject: Re: [Ground-station] Sounding Rockets and FPGAs - at a University

Where are the successful industry-university-opensource partnerships? It is definitely not all bad news or misunderstandings. It's really difficult to pull off collaborations given the very different goals and methods of the (at least) three communities involved. Getting a better fit between communities and getting better results does mean looking at what did or did not work.

What does work?

Stanford, MIT, VT, and many other schools are way ahead of the game and are, or have recently been, innovative in getting broad involvement behind student work. Some of this appears to be 1) firmly enabling fundamental research topics and 2) overfunding to the point where research risks can be tolerated and 3) having a pipeline ready for productized proprietary/secret work in order to keep the funding coming in.

None of these programs are perfect. But, relatively small investments have resulted in enormous impact and results.

With the potential for many tens of billions of dollars of increased spending on NSF coming up rapidly in the US Congress, it seems that working well with "The Academy" remains and will be a very important option. Even for smaller operations like ORI. Any increase in spending is going to go through all of the many traditional mechanisms, such as NSF and NASA. These are mechanisms that have produced an enormous quantity of work that, in most cases, can be read and used by us for free. There's no way we can do what we do without that body of work.

With the educational mission becoming more and more important to the amateur radio service (and to the foundations that can fund ambitious work) then it's going to be up to us to learn how to fit in and adapt, when pursuing this sort of thing. That means understanding what the fundamental research topics of a particular institution (or professor) are. Sometimes this is easy to figure out, and sometimes it is not!

This is just part of the landscape and it's just part of what we do. We can work on forward error correction and communications systems entirely apart from academia, conferences, seminars, and student projects.

I believe that there's so much potential mutual benefit possible with "big education", that there's an obligation to keep at it. The reason I'm talking about it on the list and asking for feedback and sorting through how this relates to wider open source work is to get our volunteers the best possible opportunities.

-Michelle W5NYV



On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 11:05 AM Michelle Thompson <mountain.michelle at gmail.com<mailto:mountain.michelle at gmail.com>> wrote:
This raises a point that keeps coming up over the years. And you inspire consideration about another issue.

There's a huge amount of work/results in closed literature. Usually due to national security concerns.

Part of the problem in doing open source work is running into people and volunteers that know something can be done, but they can't cite the source and do not feel like they can describe it. Missiles and rockets are certainly in this category.

There has to be something that we can verify and test with the really remarkable work we are doing. We have some very good ideas identified so far. Let's keep trying to come up with ideas and clarify them as best we can.

Based on what we've talked about, it seems that we have to "market" our ideas better to schools in order to get them to care. It's on us to make it "cool" enough for students to select. I'm completely biased and all-in on what we do, but full time people like me, and a 501(c)(3), and funding, have not been enough in the recent past to be "picked". I am actively trying to up the game here, any way I can, to get the work done and people educated. It's my fault for not knowing how to do this in a way that gets us recognized and engaged.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

There's another subject here, and it needs to be brought up.

Working things out from first principles, when it's necessary, can only be done in practice by people with the time, talent, and treasure necessary. In other words, by people with relative privilege. Or, by people that accept the burden and try anyway. I can think of several active projects in this category, some of which we support.

And this sort of thing harshly limits the promise of open source work in two ways. 1) we sometimes really do need to liberate closed work and this is uncomfortable and requires some brass body parts and 2) it can most easily be done by people with economic privilege.

This brings up how to pay for open source work. Not just for creation, but for sustaining engineering.

I can try and describe this with words, but this image is better:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

We have to acknowledge this. I am not sure that we can address it, but it's a really big problem. If we can't solve it, then we have to accept some very unhappy limitations on open source work.

We know and understand that all the major amatuer radio philanthropic organizations (in general) decline to pay overhead and salaries. They will pay for materials, parts, boards, and tools. But, they have rejected paying for overhead or salaries. Oddly, they will fund scholarships. The scholarship economy, the scholarship marketing movement, and scholarship funds are all about overhead and salary. And, privilege.

First, scholarships fund the administration of schools. The reason we have a scholarship economy is because overhead and administrative costs are the things that have caused tuition to rise so sharply in the United States. This is a problem almost unique to the United States, and I apologize to readers outside of the US where this may not apply.

Second, if you only fund college scholarships, and won't directly pay people to do open source work, then it's decided that the fund will support a system that filters out a huge number of talented people. As an extremely well-educated person, who went to an elite university, I am here to tell you that only funding college scholarships to "get technical work done" really does contribute to a homogenous tech scene. Technology is sexist, racist, and bigoted. If you are going "what?!" or want or need a good introduction to this problem, then https://www.npr.org/2019/03/17/704209639/caroline-criado-perez-on-data-bias-and-invisible-women is a great start.

Philanthropic organizations that want to change the way things work on the ground, for real people, have to rethink their approach. If we only fund university scholarships and molecules (PCBs, components, etc) we are missing  almost all the leverage.

I assert that if scholarships can be funded, then so can open source worker salaries. Open source worker salaries result in same or better civic good than scholarships. Direct payments to vetted workers might even be more efficient and will result in better economic outcomes to open source work. People directly affected by bad tech done by homogenous commercial interests? They are the very best people to pay to produce better work.

Why is there resistance to paying for overhead and salaries?

Because of a real and legitimate concern about waste and laziness and fraud and misunderstandings and completely different expectations and value systems.

I'll give one example in the category of the work that is quite often paid for now, that was a complete and total mismatch.

I was and am involved with an engineering project at a University, involving several large corporate partners. They had a certification program through a major online education app. This was a big open source effort. There was a paid (employed!) open source evangelist, traction with volume production for the hardware, and lots of truly great code/applications/creativity/Makers etc.

When it came time to produce the instruction - that's when we had a big problem. These were classes that people were going to take online for a *certification* from a university. The deal was two professors, with full support of the university, took the entire amount of money to produce the educational content and... the money disappeared into the University. No content was produced. After an appropriate amount of time for content to appear, inquiries were made.

Nothing could be done.

Now, this was not what was supposed to happen. There was a contract, there were expectations, multiple meetings, lists, posts, commitments, community momentum, a contract from the online supplier, etc.

The professors produced brief 1-minute or so introductions for the 40 class sessions. They didn't provide expected instruction, they did not review anything, and they did not produce content themselves. Getting email answered was hard. They honestly thought they had provided full value.

They took the entire amount for the entire program and expressed genuine surprise that there was any unhappiness at all. It was about 40 minutes total content for a very large amount of money. This was "they way it was done". Ranks were closed.

But, the show really had to go one. So, volunteers organized by the project employee came up with the contracted educational content, got A/V support at additional cost, edited the classes, dealt with the educational content distributor's many requirements, handled the student forum, handled the customer service forum, did the labs, and updated the content as the platform and the framework used rapidly changed. For a while. With no compensation, because the entire amount for all of this work was consumed by the university up front.

The only option to enforce some sort of sharing of the money was to sue.

That option was not pursued. It was politically impossible for an industry-backed and industry-funded consortium to sue a university where three of the board members had graduated from. Total non-starter.

The staff member and volunteer corps on this project were rapidly burned out. The people that were really good at this work, and wanted the project to continue, moved quickly away. No project like this is planned now or for the future. The university doesn't understand why the "community" isn't "more forthcoming" with "efforts". Well, it's because they all remember what happened.

So, yes. There's reasons for declining to fund "overhead" and "salaries" when stories like this are not uncommon. I know many of you reading this have very similar stories of your own.

However, a blanket prohibition hits that team in Nebraska (xkcd) pretty hard. They can't get the justice of compensation for their work. Yes, the project was given/published as a gift. But, as we know, a gift economy only works when there is reciprocity of at least respect, if not value. Lacking both, it collapses over time.

If we want open source work to be enduring, then we have to start seriously considering paying people to do the work, instead of assuming only rich educated people will spend literally years of their lives putting up with the static to make great things happen. All endeavors succeed or fail based on how they can scale. We have a scaling problem in open source, and in open source funding, and none of us are immune from it. One of the ways we can solve it is "pay the people that can do the work".

Larger foundations that have the money, and need to spend it, have a unique opportunity here to fundamentally change the world. Yes, work on university projects. But, please, seriously consider paying open source workers directly. There are so many people that would do this full time if they could. They've said so. They are not hard to find. A contract for 1-5 years for specific deliverables is an easy legal document. The benefits are enormous. Right now, we have dozens of really amazing open source workers begging for dozens of dollars on Patreon and Kickstarter. Philanthropic organizations could fund all this work, today. That's literally just the tip of the iceberg. It's only the most privileged and most able open source workers that have set these sorts of things up.

Back to sounding rockets - I'm going to move forward with some discussions as soon as some school deadlines are done. I am hoping we can take advantage of both Research and Development opportunities.

More soon,
-Michelle W5NYV



On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 8:13 PM Thomas Savarino via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>> wrote:
I think that some meaningful work of integrating navigation and communication is possible here.  I got the idea from some email where someone said something about using the sounding rocket behavior for something.

I had two ideas for experiments
1. Attach cheap accelerometers to crystal frequency sources and measure the frequency drifts during rapid accelerations. This measurement could provide an error signal somehow to correct the main clock frequency in a system.
2. It might be combined with something else, maybe a 3DOF Inertial measurement unit that would measure accelerations and maybe autocorrect Doppler shifts that occur during a flight.
I suspect that these ideas are pretty old in some areas, like ballistic missiles, but getting it to work wouldn’t be that easy.
I think that some meaningful work of integrating navigation and communication is possible here.

So, there you go.

Best
S

Sent from my iPad

On Apr 4, 2021, at 2:47 PM, Alex Wege via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>> wrote:

>>"Adapting to harsh and changing conditions quickly and reliably is a big systems challenge for us. Is a sounding rocket the right entry point to test this sort of work?"

I think this is an awesome idea! As a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota rocketry team I can tell you it's difficult to build a perfect telemetry system for a rocket -- especially supersonic ones.
They might even appreciate just running some adaptive coding and FEC blocks like in DVB-S2 to improve link stability (assuming they ran into similar issues).
That would also be an opportunity to test out (by proxy) the dynamics of our adaptive coding system in a stressful environment.


On a less related note, I think our system would be perfectly suited for any high altitude ballooning teams to experiment with -- that would be really cool to see.

-KE0RYT

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 11:32 AM Jay Francis via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute<mailto:ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute>> wrote:
Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station wrote on 4/4/21 10:39 AM:
> If we were to propose an FPGA experiment on a sounding rocket (this is
> with a University), what would be the best experiment?
It's probably easier to get FCC STA licenses for sounding rocket
launches than orbital due to the limited duration.  I've done it a
couple times now for S-Band telemetry on vehicles.  This could be a way
to test very experimental modulation/protocols that might not be
approved for orbital operation.

Flight testing deployment of very small hardware (similar to Ambasat
size or smaller) may also be possible since there's no orbital debris
tracking issues.  It could be interesting to have a sounding rocket
deployment mechanism to test swarms of small networked "satellites".

Experiments flown on sounding rockets aren't necessarily only activated
in space (unlike cubesats).  They can be designed to run through the
whole flight.

The flight environment (acceleration, shock and vibe) of most sounding
rockets is a bit harsher than an orbital launch - be prepared for that,
or take advantage of it :-)

--Jay, KA1PQK


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