"An Aerospace Coder Drags a Stodgy Industry Toward..." Topic

…Open Source.

"More than a decade ago, software engineer Ryan Melton spent his evenings, after workdays at Ball Aerospace, trying to learn to use a 3-D modeling program. After a few weeks, for all his effort, he could make … rectangles that moved. Still, it was a good start. Melton showed his spinning digital shapes to Ball, a company that makes spacecraft and spacecraft parts, and got the go-ahead he'd been looking for: He could try to use the software to model a gimbal—the piece on a satellite that lets the satellite point.

Melton wanted to build the program to save himself time, learn something new. "It was something I needed for me," he says. But his work morphed into a software project called Cosmos—a "command and control" system that sends instructions to satellites and displays data from their parts and pieces. Ball used it for some 50 flight projects and on-the-ground test systems. And in 2014, Melton decided Cosmos should share its light with the world. Today, it's been used with everything from college projects to the planet-seeking Kepler telescope.

Opening up Cosmos wasn't an easy swallow for the aerospace industry. It's historically closed-off: Big companies sell big-bucks programs, and people either shell out or cobble together their own kludgy systems. But a freely available, edit-able, enhance-able program has been a boon to researchers and businesses—anyone that can benefit from a robust system to point satellites and display their data…"
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