
A web-based mission control framework by NASA - ____Sash---701_
https://github.com/nasa/openmct
======
dotdi
I've worked for the European Space Agency and EUMETSAT and it's crazy how much
effort is wasted because everybody is writing separate mission control,
monitoring and data analysis applications that do 95% of the same things, each
with its own horrendous UX/UI, idiosyncrasies and bugs.

I'm not in that industry anymore but I just wish everybody would just grow up,
use this (and related) software and contribute. No reason not to do that (of
course except for pride).

~~~
KineticLensman
This is actually a generic problem in public acquisition - projects are
tightly funded to meet specific customer requirements and cannot themselves
resolve enterprise-level problems. Building for re-use tends to add complexity
/ cost and a hard-nosed PM will not easily be pursued to solve someone else's
problem. It seems to require top-down commitment of intent and resources - and
a big stick - to make individual projects do the right thing.

Obviously there can be situations where common approaches are developed and
used but this seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

(source - I've spent 10 years trying to work this issue in a UK public
acquisition context)

~~~
calgoo
This is an issue in enterprise situations as well, I have 100s of servers
which are supposed to be "managed" but each project / product manager just
adds their own company card to amazon and builds their own platform. The only
way this can be solved is if it gets escalated to VP / CTO levels and they
force everyone to follow the "standards".

~~~
lifeisstillgood
oddly enough most enterprises I know have servers "standards" for their own
data centres and would dearly love to just fork cash to amazon to get them out
of that hell

~~~
Cshelton
Yup. The heads of IT at enterprises are begging to just switch everything to
AWS/GCP/etc., while all the mid level IT guys are starting to see the writing
on the wall. Much of what they do will not exist anymore and they will need to
retool themselves and/or find a new job.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
There is just as much work in the cloud, if anything there’s more.

------
larkinrichards
Lead Dev for Open MCT here, excited to see this show up while I was reading
the news last night! Happy to answer questions if I can, and please don't
hesitate to contact us using the email address on the website as well.

------
bergie
Open MCT is fun to work with. We're using it as an IoT dashboard at our
hackerspace:

[https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/nasa-openmct-iot-
dashboard/](https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/nasa-openmct-iot-dashboard/)

~~~
heavenlyblue
How much better is it that Grafana?

------
tlrobinson
Definitely planning on using this on my next space mission.

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Niten
"Houston, we have serious problems here. We're tumbling end over end. We're
disengaged from the Agena."

"Try increasing left-pad."

(But seriously, this is really cool and I'm looking forward to trying the
Kerbal Space Program plugin.)

~~~
eksemplar
We use them more and more in the public sector, and they can be perfectly
fine.

It’s a little silly, but it’s where most of the UI innovation and technical
skills lie at the moment, and we’re frankly getting to the point where there
isn’t that much of an alternative.

------
piracyde25
Does SpaceX use similar tool? KSP does[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/hudsonfoo/kerbal-
openmct](https://github.com/hudsonfoo/kerbal-openmct)

~~~
ealhad
I'm pretty sure SpaceX is just Elon Musk reproducing his KSP campaign IRL.

------
INTPenis
This is great. What did NASA use before? I always got the impression they were
still using a Unix-type OS and CDE or some other Motif based WM far into the
2000's.

This would really modernize things. And I love how the whole project is so
clearly made to enable contribution from the open source community. Really
aspiring to leverage open source in the best possible way.

I guess they'd have to make it as easy as possible because the project might
not have many uses outside of NASA.

~~~
oso2k
I spent the bulk of the first 8.5 years of my career in and around JPL’s
Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF), Test Engineering Lab (TEL), Assembly,
Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO), aka, Building 179.

A lot of software systems in Operations a little more than 10 years ago were
(Open?)Motif on Solaris. I remember helping a colleague transition to Qt when
Motif’s event system just couldn’t handle an extra 30 data streams we were
projecting for use by Mars Science Lander. It was something like a 30 minute
demo of Qt Designer (with Hal, the software engineer actually tasked) and him
giving up a weekend to full replace all the Motif code. The codebase had
shrunk by more than half, all 30 additional data streams had been added, and
the Ops Engineers reported that the app was noticeably snappier even with the
new streams.

------
chasd00
This is very cool! i got into high powered model rocketry as a hobby and made
my own very basic, command line driven, mission control software. My rocket
has a little raspberry pi zero wired up with an IMU and some other sensors. On
the pad it connects to my mission control system over wifi running on my
laptop. I get to do the whole launch sequence and "the launch computer has
taken over the countdown" thing (technically a no-no but it's just for fun on
my own). The onboard flight computer detects apogee using a barometer,
accelerometer, and a kalman filter which then deploys the chute with a little
black powder charge. It's a very fun and educational hobby but can get $$

------
RaleyField
It's great that all dependencies have been made to satisfy stringent NASA
software assurance standards. A great day for entire NPM ecosystem.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I think this is sarcasm. At least I _hope_ it is.

------
zeveb
I don't know how I feel or what I think about running mission control from a
browser. Seems like it'd probably lead to lower defects to build something
very simple very close to the metal — and _probably_ not at a prohibitive
level of cost, either. The advantage would be cutting out the OS, the desktop
environment, the fancy GPU software, the browser, the JavaScript interpreter,
the JavaScript dependencies &c. from the critical path. The disadvantage of
course would be running homegrown software which performs some (but not all!)
of those functions.

Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'm certainly open to being persuaded.

~~~
rcv
I made the transition from writing native QT applications in C++ to javascript
front ends (generally React) a few years ago. In my experience, writing robust
front-end applications was much harder in C++ than it is in javascript. The
memory management in QT can get pretty complicated for large applications, and
a single mistake can get you a segfault crash. Not to mention that it's much
easier to hot-patch a javascript file on the server and then ask everyone to
please hit CTRL-R on their browsers than it is to recompile and redistribute a
binary to all my clients. At this point, all of the UI components at my
company are js based and I couldn't be happier.

------
planteen
For those interested, Ball Aerospace has a similar open source tool called
COSMOS written in Ruby. It has been used for a number of missions there as
well as some CubeSats:

[https://cosmosrb.com/](https://cosmosrb.com/)

------
smarx007
Great to see this getting open-sourced but let's be honest: without support
for PUS, CCSDS and other ECSS standards (or any alternative) this only covers
a single-digit percent of the effort needed to develop a mission control
system.

~~~
larkinrichards
Correct-- there are other components of a ground data system which handle the
space link and and other services, but that is outside the scope of Open MCT.
We integrate with a large number of those systems via plugins although it is
difficult (for non-technical reasons) to open source all of that work.

"mission control" is a relatively opaque concept and I hope that by open
sourcing components we can shed more light on the overall architecture and
complexity of mission systems and perhaps even begin to simplify them.

------
smaili
Looks like their live demo site [https://openmct-
demo.herokuapp.com/](https://openmct-demo.herokuapp.com/) has an error.

~~~
larkinrichards
Should be back online now.

~~~
th0ma5
Works very nice! Only minor thing, couldn't come back her on mobile :p pretty
astounding otherwise, and also astounding even if that isn't fixed, heh.

~~~
jaxn
Yes, the back button is badly broken. It's like NASA secretly telling us
"there is no going back"

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Or perhaps that commanding space missions from your mobile isn't a priority ;)

------
elkos
I recently uploaded a video in youtube from Jay Trimble's talk about Open MCT
from the Open Source Cubesat Workshop 2018 that took place in Madrid. Feel
free to check it out:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Dh74INR_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Dh74INR_I)

------
xvilka
On the one hand modernizing such things is really, really good initiative. On
the other hand JavaScript/CSS frameworks tend to be very actively developed,
thus changing the API or even deprecating the whole framework. This might be
the problem for mission critical software.

~~~
usrusr
Why would it be a problem? You freeze the dependencies and then occasionally
remind yourself that despite your use of web technology you absolutely do not
want to control your mission from devices exposed to the regular web, where
Updates Matter.

------
mingodad
It uses a lot of CPU for no apparent reason.

~~~
tomelders
Angular.

~~~
wilgertvelinga
No. It uses Vue.

~~~
larkinrichards
Still angular 1.4 on master, with all the problems of large watch count and
high digest rates causing a lot of cpu usage just to make a clock tick.

We’re in progress on refactors to remove angular, which is no small feat given
the number of things which angular does for an application.

~~~
jnbiche
Are you swapping Angular for VueJS, or something else?

~~~
larkinrichards
VueJS will replace a subset of our Angular 1.x usage, and we will remove
Angular 1.x, but it's not fair to describe it as a "swap": they do different
things.

~~~
jnbiche
Yeah, I struggled to find the right word, but settled on using "swap" since I
couldn't think of any better description at the moment.

That said, there is significant overlap between the two.

------
pjmlp
I guess it is time to say goodbye to Netbeans based UIs used at NASA then.

The UI demo does actually look quite good.

------
hacker_9
Excellent stuff, now I just need them to open source the spaceship too.

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
and the bank account.

------
theshadeslayer
Great, now I can launch that space mission I've been planning to since
forever.

------
ConcernedCoder
you lost me at Angular sorry...

------
alwaysreading
Very cool. I visited Johnson Space Center mission control in Houston last week
and was reminded how really smart people are monitoring and flying the ISS
24/7.

ISS has planned communication outages resulting from satellite signal loss.
Everyone in mission control knows when these disconnects will occur and how
long they’ll last and plan their breaks around them.

~~~
Stratoscope
I hope you will see this comment. I wanted to let you know that your account
has apparently been "shadowbanned", which means that you can see your own
comments but no one else sees them unless they have "showdead" turned on in
their account settings.

If you view an HN page that you commented on in an incognito window, you will
see what I'm talking about.

I can only guess that the moderators took this action because of the large
number of Amazon affiliate links you have been posting.

Its fine to post an occasional product link when it relates to the topic, but
affiliate links are not so welcome - especially when they are disguised behind
an amzn.to shortened URL. Just post an original Amazon link, with everything
removed from the URL except the minimum required to go to the correct page.
The URL should look like
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/NNNNNNNNNN/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/NNNNNNNNNN/)
where the N's are the ASIN.

Some of your other comments, like this one, are good quality and people have
"vouched" them which makes them visible to all.

I suggest you email the moderators (address is somewhere in the links at the
bottom of every page) with an apology and a promise to not post any more
affiliate links. Maybe they will reinstate your account.

~~~
atomical
0 points 1 hour ago | parent | edit | on: A web-based mission control
framework by NASA

~~~
Stratoscope
Yes, as I said, this is because someone vouched it. Try turning on "showdead"
in your account settings and view their comments in a logged in window, and
you will see all the dead comments. Then view the same URL incognito or
without showdead and you will see what I'm talking about.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alwaysreading](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alwaysreading)

