I hereby, and until notice to the contrary, endow the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award. This prize will consist of 3 ounces of gold or the monetary equivalent going to the next amateur team launching a vehicle to a height in excess of 200 kilometers, which in my opinion qualifies as an open source entry. These funds will be disbursed at my sole discretion.
For a an entry to qualify as "Open Source", for purposes of this prize, the team launching a rocket must make available sufficient information in machine readable form via the web to create and launch a rocket the same as the entry which travelled to 200 kilometers. The entry description should also include a description of safety procedures used to launch the rocket in question. The entry description considered must be public domain or available under a license that qualifies as Open Source according to the Open Source Consortium. The manufacture of the rocketry entry should be accomplished by tools and materials that are readily available to the general public from multiple sources or are themselves Open Source.
My primary intent here is to create an award that encourages free distribution of detailed rocketry designs that can be refined by a number of individuals similar to the way Linux kernel development has harness the energies of a large team throughout the world. It is not my intent to encourage entrants to relinquish their rights to patent protection by publishing their inventions (though the act of publishing may have legal ramifications). Candidates for the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award may be relinquishing substantial rights to maintain intellectual property via trade secrets (and may be relinquishing foreign patent rights if they haven't filed by the date they publish on the web). Entry descriptions may be "dual licensed" (i.e. the entry description may be available on the web via the GPL, but the entrant might still charge corporations for whom the GPL is not an acceptable license a fee to get this same material under some other license which might not be an Open Source license). I will be loose in my interpretation of what "Open Source" means for purposes of this prize (though I may endow a future prize with a tighter definition).
There are real difficulties in applying the Open Source model to amateur rocketry. I would expect that entries to this contest might be using rather different sets of tools and materials--many of which will have proprietary components. It is my hope here to provide some basic designs that will be ready when techniques like those described in Marshall Burns's "Automated Fabrication" or Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems", make creation of small runs of complex machines relatively inexpensive. Still, gcc didn't need the linux kernel and BSD kernels to be ready and useful. Nor did linux need availability of an Open Source design for a microprocesser to be manufactured in quantity to be useful. I expect that over time, we'll see standards emerge for Open Source rocketry designs. I intend to revise this award description to reflect these standards as they emerge (for example, I can imagine that we might eventually want to specify that some specific Open Source tool describe the design and assembly of a rocket when we can assume that the lion's share of rocketry amateurs have access to tools compliant with specific standards). I will give folks advance warning of any such changes so that this minimally affects work that is in progress.
My real goal in supporting space development is recreating the positive economic and social conditions that accompanied development of the American frontier without the moral stain of anything like African slavery, the genocide of Native Americans or the extinction of large portion of the flora and fauna of the Americas. I feel that space development does give us this possibility-and the capability to solve some basic human problems. Stories like the settlement of true frontiers like Iceland or New Zealand (stories in which the newcomers weren't displacing previous residents) are all too rare in human history. The closest parallel to what awaits humanity in space may be the story of the initial settlement of Eurasia which is only now being slowly recovered using scientific techniques.
I hope we are creating here development of a technological toolkit that can greatly enhance human freedom. In most of humanity's history, the necessities of life were provided by knowledge that could be operated by members of a relatively small community. The development of space may solve conflicts over basic resources. The combination of enhanced small scale, small run manufacturing, open source techniques and space development may provide humanity with the potential to have the benefits of industrial and cosmopolitan society without the negative side effects.
There has been the widespread assumption that space development is inherently the preserve of large governments and corporations-despite the fact that major breakthroughs in this area have (i.e. Goddard's first liquid fuel rockets) have come from people working outside major corporations or government institutions. I have never seen a really good comparison of the "bang for buck" of the governmental, corporate and small scale space development efforts. I strongly suspect that the results of such an investigation will show that the small scale efforts have been remarkably successful and influential. Small scale space development has been given up on before any really large sums of money or mass effort has been applied in this direction. This means that the real effects of such resources is still something of an unanswered, tantalyzing question.
I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration here of the Bowery Award for Amateur Rocketry, and its encouragement that others endow similar prizes. This prize is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother's cousin, Charles Stark Draper.
Oct. 30, 2000