Want To Build A NASA Rocket? Agency Goes Public With Source Code

jeremy · 05-19-2015, 09:03 AM

Quote:

You no longer have to be a rocket scientist to access more than 1,000 cutting-edge program tools from NASA.

This week, NASA published its second annual Software Catalog, which makes much of the coding its top scientists use on a daily basis available for public consumption at no cost.

“As the emerging commercial space industry takes flight, NASA software helps give the leg up that new companies in this nascent industry need,” said Doug Rand, assistant director for entrepreneurship at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a statement accompanying the catalog.

Some of these complex engineering and aeronautics codes are the same ones used for such NASA missions as guiding spacecraft into the far reaches of the solar system and facilitating land rovers through Mars’ rough landscape.

So far, NASA is the sole agency to release such a complete set of software tools, according to a post on the White House Office of Science and Technology blog.

The program tools are organized into 15 separate categories, which range in scope from aeronautics and propulsion, to system testing and handling, according to the catalog.

For example, the Vehicle Sketch Pad, or OpenVSP, is a tool NASA uses to design aircrafts by way of geometry modeling.

More at NextGov...

Did any LQ members download anything from the previous version of the catalog?

--jeremy