Team FREDNET
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Team FREDNET is an international Open Source and Open Participation competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. Uniquely, the team also allows organizations and individuals to participate freely in its mission through the team's website. Their strategy is to utilize the same approach for developing open source software in order to build a lunar lander and a lunar rovers capable of winning the Google Lunar X Prize.[1] Team FREDNET plans to establish an Open Space Foundation that provides incentives, education, and funding to future individuals and organizations seeking to develop their own space projects. In addition, they hope to foster greater public interest and education in Space Exploration and Research.[2]
Key People
Team FREDNET is led by Fred J. Bourgeois, III.[2] Dr. Sean Casey of the Universities Space Research Association[3] manages business development for Team FREDNET. Mike Barrucco is the principal guidance, navigation, and control engineer for the team.[3] Richard Core is Team FREDNET's project manager.[3]
Key Affiliations
Team FREDNET has affiliations with a number of clubs, schools, and businesses.
- Stuyvesant Robot Club[4]
- Elphel[5]
- Team Cheese of the Fall 2009 MECH 460 course from Queen's University in Kingston Ontario, Canada - Working on designing systems to be used for the Lunar Lander System.[6]
As of 2009[update], the team had two sponsors.[7]
- Applios Inc—Applied Open Source Technologies
- Robot Club of Traverse City
Open Source Development Team
The team's charter is "Make Cool Stuff." This objective applies towards "stuff" that can be used in Space and towards building tools that will make it easier to build design the space "stuff". Essentially, the goal is to build a catalog of Space Components in order to make Space Commercialization more open, cost-effective, productive, and accessible.[8]
Open Source Development Team
Organizing this far-flung group posed perhaps the biggest and earliest challenge. Open source software teams can normally download a program and add their own contributions, but Team FREDNET had to translate its many individual ideas into rocket engines and rover gears.[9]
To address this challenge, Team FREDNET took major steps in August and September 2009 to make it easier for globally distributed collaboration to occur by providing guidelines for people who wanted to make contributions.[10]
Open Source Development Software Tools
Team FREDNET relies heavily on Open Source Software Tools to accomplish their mission.
