Online Community Project Aims for the Moon - Team FREDNET

Space.com has a nice article about Team FREDNET and their quest for the Google Lunar X Prize.
- LRK -

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Online Community Project Aims for the Moon
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090520-tw-glxp-frednet.html

By Jeremy Hsu - Staff Writer
posted: 20 May 2009 - 09:47 am ET

Nearly 40 years after Americans first set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 with NASA's historic Apollo 11 flight, a host of private rocketeers are hoping to follow to win a $30 million prize. Here, SPACE.com looks at Team FREDNET, one of 17 teams competing in the Google Lunar X Prize:

Open source usually applies to virtual space rather than outer space, but Team FREDNET hopes to apply the concept toward winning the Google Lunar X Prize.

The growing group of netizens hopes to reach the moon using the mantra "simple, small, low mass, low budget," after starting from a network of professional friends and the vision of a man named Fred Bourgeois.

"It was only natural to fully use the Internet to pull together the team," said Rich Core, Team FREDNET's software lead and a longtime friend of Bourgeois.

Bourgeois grew up in the space business around Huntsville, Alabama and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. There he made friends with people such as Core, who spent a long career working for aerospace giants such as Lockheed-Martin and as a software consultant in Silicon Valley.

That informal network of friends became the basis for Team FREDNET's talent when Bourgeois saw the Google Lunar X Prize announcement that challenged teams to land a robot on the moon, move at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and beam high definition views back to Earth.

Bourgeois e-mailed Core and others with a straightforward proposition — did they want to go to the moon

snip
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Check out Team FREDNET's web site. Maybe you will want to join them.
- LRK -

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Team FREDNET
http://www.frednet.com/

*/Team FREDNET/* is a group of scientists, technologists, and engineers who are using their combined talents to create a timely and elegant solution to win the *Google Lunar X Prize *.

*/Team FREDNET/* is going to the Moon, the Engineering Project of a Lifetime!

*/ Team FREDNET/*: the First and Only 100% Open Source Competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize.

Team FREDNET Leaders
Fred J. Bourgeois, III
Richard D. Core
Ryan Weed
Joseph M. Stevenson

Team FREDNET - Three Teams, Many Goals, One Primary Mission
Written by Fred J. Bourgeois, III
Three Teams, Many Goals, One Primary Mission

Team FREDNET attempts to do several things that no organization has successfully done before, and that requires some innovation. Innovation often starts in chaos. The chaos makes us aware of needs, which in turn spark ideas of how to meet those needs with various solutions. Those solutions in turn generate
Read more... *http://tinyurl.com/ptl8ra*

snip
---------------------------------------------------------------------

One rock moved at a time, and the mountain moves too.
One small launch to the Moon, and the way for all to go to the Moon is open.

Team FREDNET has a plan, take a look.
http://www.frednet.com/
- LRK -

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Team FREDNET Promo Video

http://photos.imageevent.com/frednet/tfx/animations/Teaser.mov
This short promotional video gives an overview of early conceptual designs for our Open Source Space Systems.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
==============================================================
http://www.frednet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:tfx-structure&catid=40:org-faq-articles
TinyUrl for above - *http://tinyurl.com/ptl8ra

Team FREDNET - Three Teams, Many Goals, One Primary Mission
Written by Fred J. Bourgeois, III
Three Teams, Many Goals, One Primary Mission

Team FREDNET attempts to do several things that no organization has successfully done before, and that requires some innovation. Innovation often starts in chaos. The chaos makes us aware of needs, which in turn spark ideas of how to meet those needs with various solutions. Those solutions in turn generate opportunities. Not every solution is the best solution, because (among other things) not every need was expressed correctly in the first place. That is when we go back to the drawing board, and work to better understand the need, and thereby better understand the problem, which leads to a better solution.

When I started Team FREDNET the main question everyone asked was "How do you make an Open Source Team competitive? Won't your competitors steal your best ideas?" I knew (gut-level "knew") that there was a way to do this project using Open Source techniques and still be a real competitor for the Prize, but initially I had no idea how to accomplish that. After months of working on this project and the underlying business to support the Team and the projects, the methodology has gradually crystallized and become more and more clear. That too was an exercise in learning by doing, recognizing perceived needs, expressing those needs as first-pass problems, and developing initial solutions. Frankly, many of those solutions were wrong. In fact, the best solutions I had initially failed to recognize entirely what problem I was trying to solve. On the other hand, those initial solutions were essential to coming to an understanding of what the problem really is, which led me to better express the real need (or more appropriately, my current understanding of the real need). This has been a highly iterative process. Such is innovation.

Rich and I launched the Team with the belief that we'd only get a few dozen participants, and mostly from the network of people we had known and worked with over the years. Running a Team of people you know well and have worked with before is quite a different prospect than working with people you've just met. Building working relationships takes time and a different kind of effort. We were more than a little surprised to find 80 members signed up and chomping at the bit to get to work within days of opening our initial forum web site. Now, eighteen months later, we're even more surprised (and delighted) at the growing response: more than 500 registrants on the forum, and dozens of those making serious, dedicated, and sometimes expensive development work for this cause.

So what does it mean to be 100% Open Source, 100% Open Participation, and 100% Focused on Victory for the Google Lunar X PRIZE ... and therefore 100% focused on beating our most worthy competitors? I'll tell you when we get there! No, seriously, I'll present my best understanding of how we're envisioning this process right now, but (and based on our experience of the past 18 months) I'm pretty sure this will have to evolve further as we proceed in our work. Here goes.

*snip
==============================================================

WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

==============================================================