Post edited 6:22 am – January 9, 2010 by Luke Maurits



I think we should make it a major goal to have a really nice "CLLARE Project Overview" document ready before the end of January.

This document will briefly explain what CLLARE and CSTART are, will outline the mission (i.e. describe our lunar orbit rendezvous plan etc), will introduce all the core hardware components, will discuss our launch options and have as many accurate mass and cost estimates for everything as we can possibly manage. This document will be an excellent help to us. It will help us convince people that we are serious and competent, it will help to get people excited about the idea by showing them how simply and cheaply it can be done. We can post links to this document to /r/space and /r/science with provocative headlines like "CLLARE: an open source US$50m manned moon mission designed by CSTART, an open source space agency born on Reddit" – that is the sort of thing that should get heavily upmodded. We can also (probably before that) give copies of this document to the experienced outsiders we are on good terms with (Peter Madsen from Copenhagen Suborbitals, Gary Schneider from Open Luna) and ask for their ideas to get really good, specific feedback. Basically this will be a huge help to the project and will bring us to the point where we just need more experienced people in to refine the details. Those of us who aren't engineers can then focus without distraction on finally getting all the legal corporate stuff taken care of.

I don't have a lot of spare time this weekend to work on this, but I threw together a partially complete concept last night to get the ball rolling. It's a pdf file (complete with links into our Wiki at appropriate points), you can grab it here (aside: I wanted to upload it to the Wiki, but it said I couldn't upload a .pdf, can we reconfigure the Wiki so this is possible?). There's a lot more work to do, but this gives you a sense of the flavour of what I think we should aim for.

I'd really like to see a lot of collaboration on this. Obviously the core members from this forum who know the plan and the hardware best will need to be involved, but this is also the kind of thing we should try to recruit new members from Reddit for. People with good graphics and CAD skills should be able to pitch in by helping to provide as many diagrams and concept figures as we think is useful. People with good marketing/PR skills can make sure we word things as effectively as possible, and anybody at all can check the spelling or let us know when things are unclear to people who are meeting CLLARE for the first time. We want to make sure this document is as good as possible and we should try to activate the community as much as we can to achieve this. There are 18 votes on the 2nd phase of the motto competition already, that shows that there are interested people watching us, let's try to get them involved! I will submit a link to this post to /r/tothemoon to help facilitate this.

With regards to actually working on it, there are a few things to make clear.

Firstly, this is absolutely something that we should be using our Mercurial repository for. I have created a clone repository for myself to work on this in. I am not sure whether or not the best approach would be for other people to clone my clone and merge all changes there, pushing from my clone to the main repository, or to have other people produce their own clones of the main repository and for us to try to keep them all in sync. Whatever works, works, I suppose.

I don't want anybody to feel like they can't contribute to this because they don't know Mercurial so if you can't figure out how to do something or you just can't be bothered, instead of doing nothing just post your material in this forum or email it to me and I will make sure it gets in.

Secondly, the document is produced using LaTeX. For the unfamiliar, LaTeX is a typesetting proram that is very popular in academia and in the publishing sector. It takes a plain text file of marked up text (sort of similar to a HTML file) and turns it into a pdf (or a few other formats) in such a way that it looks really professional and clean. It automatically takes care of all the presentation issues, builds tables of contents of reference lists, etc. and just lets you focus on your actual material. It also has incredible support for formatting very complicated mathematical equations, chemical formulae, etc. This is why LaTeX is the practically the only thing used to produce papers in the engineering, science and maths part of academia.

There is a bit of a learning curve if you are new to LaTeX, but there is heaps of documentation online, including a WikiBook. I tried to make sure that my first version included examples of how to do most things that someone might want to do, so that they can just look at my code and generalise from it. The code for my version is visible online here (not line wrapped, sorry). This one file, cllare_overview.tex is the only file that needs to be modified to produce a new version of the pdf, contributing to this document is basically a matter of contributing to this .tex file.

I don't want anybody to feel like they can't contribute to this because they don't know LaTeX so if you can't figure out how to do something or you just can't be bothered, instead of doing nothing just post your material in this forum or email it to me as plain old text and I will make sure it gets in.

That's about it from me. Please start throwing out ideas! Be bold! Write snippets of text, or entire tracts, produce diagrams, make CAD models, basically use whatever skills you have to help make this document shine. If you have skills and want to contribute but you don't know what to do, just let us know what you can do and somebody will point you in a useful direction.