LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America

When talking about spacecraft technology, “state of the art” and “disruptive” are not descriptors that immediately come to mind. Deep space vehicles built via traditional methods are extremely conservative, due to the requirement that they cannot fail. Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, has a different strategy: develop low cost spacecraft that are engineered to create highly reliable systems from less expensive, commercial components. Once the spacecraft has become a commodity, it can rapidly evolve and keep pace with modern technology, and failure of any one spacecraft is not catastrophic. This is crucial to commercial space exploration and development, and is a key part of the Planetary Resources strategy. In order to make this a reality, we are adopting philosophies that are common to modern data centers and leveraging many technologies that are ubiquitous in cloud computing. In this talk we will describe how we use embedded and desktop Linux, virtualization, software redundancy, and web technologies to build spacecraft in new ways. We will also illustrate interesting parallels to conventional applications, and talk about the challenges of using open source and commodity hardware in the space environment.