Muniment #002

Spaceship! Spaceship! Spaceship!

Welcome to the second issue of Muniment. I'm glad you're along for the ride. In this issue we'll be exploring a topic near and dear to my heart, space. I've loved space ever since I saw Star Wars on VHS and got my first LEGO Space set, which is pretty much as long as I knew space was a thing. A few years ago Irma and I drove to Florida to see Endeavour go up on STS-130, which definitely checked an item off our bucket lists. The shuttle isn't flying anymore, but if you have a chance to see any kind of launch in person, don't hesitate. It's an amazing experience.

For discussion of Muniment #002, there's a handy page with comments enabled on jeffkramer.com. Check the box for email notifications of new followups, and you'll be set.

So, on to the newsletter...

The Kramer Space Program

The Kramer family may not have grand asteroid mining aspirations like Planetary Resources, a chain of hotels to fund our inflatable space habitat research like Bigelow Aerospace, or a crowdsource initiative to explore the moon like Google, but nevertheless, we have a space program. First, we saw a shuttle launch from Titusville. Then we went out to a launch pad at a NASA Social. The next, obvious step was to launch our own satellite, which we plan to do on Saturday.

That's a picture of a prototype of our satellite, up there. It's scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral on Sunday night, riding piggyback on CRS-3, the third SpaceX Dragon launch to resupply the International Space Station. Our satellite isn't heading for the space station, though, its mothership will get deployed an hour after 2nd stage engine cutoff (after the first stage turns around and tries a controlled descent into the ocean). Then, on the 15th of April, our satellite will be ejected from the mothership and be floating all alone, orbiting the earth, beaming messages to whoever will listen. Like Sputnik.

The Kramer Satellite (Call Sign JI&CK - Jeff, Irma & Clara Kramer) is one of a fleet of 250 sprites, tiny single-board radios that will be deployed from a CubeSat. CubeSats are small satellites sized to 10cm cubes, and are designed to hitch rides with commercial or national launches and put space science in the hands of people who wouldn't have had access to it before, like universities and high schools. Our CubeSat project, a Kickstarted effort called KickSat, is one of them. The KickSat CubeSat is intended to study possibilities of using swarm communications in space, which is why our sprite has its very own call sign. With the right amateur radio equipment, it should be possible to pick up JI&CK as it passes overhead, before its orbit decays in a few weeks and it burns up on reentry. Alas, the Kramer mastery of space will be short lived, but Sputink was only up there for 3 months, so for a first try we're doing pretty good.

If you'd like to track the CRS-3 launch, check out Space.com and SpaceFlightNow.com. If you're interested in space at all and Tweet or use Facebook, go sign up for a NASA Social. They're amazing. If you're in Texas and haven't done it yet, go do the Level 9 tour at Johnson Space Center. Take a day off, drive to Houston, pay the $90, and do it. You won't regret it. Assuming SpaceX starts doing launches down by South Padre Island, I'm sure there will be caravans down to watch those, too.

If you're interested in starting your own space program for (simulated) real, I've heard great things about Kerbal Space Program, a PC, Mac, and Linux game where you build space craft and fly them. It's apparently really popular at NASA. They were at SXSW but we didn't get to see them.

Rockets Go Up (And Down)

So, remember that bit about the first stage of CRS-3 turning around and trying a controlled descent? Well, that's a pretty amazing piece of engineering work. Clara's favorite rocket video is this one (see if you can figure out why), but the hexacopter view is pretty amazing, too. Those tests are done up in McGregor, Texas, between Waco and Ft. Hood. The launch Sunday will have landing legs, which should help stabilize the rockets return. The same turn-around-and-return system was tried on the recent CASSIOPE launch, and SpaceX is hoping for better results this time. Until the system can do a controlled descent into the water, they aren't going to try to set down on land.

If you've heard about SpaceX's Mars plans and can't fathom why this wouldn't cost all the money ever (even with Larry Page throwing in a few bucks), it's because SpaceX plans to reuse its boosters. By not having to rebuild the rocket from scratch every time, you drop the costs significantly. It costs less than $100,000 to fuel up a Falcon 9, versus $54 million dollars for an entire rocket build and launch.

Star Flowers

Since it's spring, it seems appropriate to highlight starshade, a really beautiful project on the drawing board at NASA. The starshade is a small spacecraft that will unfurl like a flower between a distant star and a space-based telescope. By blocking the light from the star, the telescope will then be able to take direct images of the exoplanets that orbit it. Pretty amazing stuff. Maybe they'll use one of those donated spy satellites.

ChatOps

I had lunch with Ben Odom last week, a good friend who I've known since he took over the web team at Whole Foods Market. Ben's moved into the cloud operations world, and when we were talking about the things that really get us excited, he mentioned ChatOps. I hadn't heard the specific term, but it turned out I knew what he meant. ChatOps is when you use a chat-type system for operations tasks (in contrast to DevOps, a methodology where developers are responsible for keeping their own servers running). With distributed teams becoming the norm, text-based chat systems like Campfire and HipChat are a really popular way for teams to coordinate activities. Before it might have been IRC, but Campfire and HipChat get corporate blessings and have slick push-enabled mobile clients.

The shining light of ChatOps is Hubot, a little helper program from GitHub that sits in your chat room and listens for things like 'Hubot, reboot the server' or 'Hubot, push out the new version of the web site'. It knows how to do those things, and has a whole ecosystem of contributed scripts to do other stuff. With ChatOps, it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you have a Campfire or HipChat client, you can do your operations activities. The convenience of having an agent close at hand pushes you to automate more things, too. According to Ben, auditors love it because all of these chat systems have log histories, so you know exactly who asked to reboot the server or push out a chunk of code.

I talked about Hubot in my SXSW talk last year, since I think that having agents in your phone or in a chatroom to do your bidding is a natural place for all of this to head. Siri's one faceless entity, but having a cute little collie avatar on your phone that represents your home security system is a logical way to interact with it. It makes the system approachable, gives context to your actions, and is better than another arcane UI to learn. I think we can assume that more and more things in our lives will act like Hubot. Entire systems of complexity will be hidden behind friendly, relatable, robotic faces.

As a bot bonus, there's a great post I ran across on Boing Boing last week about how a chat room bot for collecting coffee orders turned into a de-facto bank in a small tech company. Definitely worth a read.

Wrap Up & Taking Up Less Space

Next week I'll be in Miami talking to a bunch of HP People about computers that think like humans (or mammals, at least). Maybe that'll all add up to another issue.

Until then, you can enjoy this picture from an upcoming blog post. I'm thinking of titling it something Buzzfeedish like, "You won't believe how he lost 40lbs in 6 months!" The punchline is, "Diet and exercise!" I know, right? Major let-down, just like most things on Buzzfeed.

Don't forget, discussions are up on jeffkramer.com!

See you space cowboy...

- Jeff Kramer