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ThadiousGilberte

Hi all,<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I haven’t been able to think about anything but OSE the past week, this project truly has such a great potential. I am getting the amazing chance to meet with a pair of 'Industry-breaking', 'Non-traditional business model' people the first week of August: Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis. I'd like to give them the elevator pitch for helping both by donating to the project directly and by passing this around to their friends.

Secondly, I'm deploying to Afghanistan for a year in September and I have been kicking the idea around of cutting my teeth on a kickstarter to set up a small OSE workshop on my base, with the goal of donating or selling OSE equipment to local farms and towns. If anyone has any "lessons Learned" they can link or pass down to me on either of these two projects, I hope to return that value back to the community.

Matt_Maier

How'd you get a meeting with Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis? Is that all you or is it part of some kind of event?

Is the pitch something formal, or do you just figure you'll have a bit of time to converse with them? I'd be happy to help refine the pitch if you think that would be useful. Any time you can get with those guys needs to be used efficiently. Just off the top of my head I would suggest staying away from some of Marcin's more political and social goals. I suggest focusing on how open source prioritizes technical excellence over profitability, so it pushes boundaries farther and faster than closed-source development. If they feed the open source community they can harvest it for new businesses. They also tend to make their money off of high-tech endeavors, so the more people who are part of the modern world the more potential customers they have.

Are you in the service? I'm Air Force. There probably isn't going to be enough development of the GVCS to form a workshop anytime soon. If you want to set up a workshop to provide equipment to locals it will probably be just a normal shop. Normal for the context. My suggestion is to get there and figure out WHO you can help and HOW you can help them. Then find someone (maybe PA?) to document their story. Then start an indiegogo/kickstarter campaign that is heavy on sentimentality and light on engineering. Work OSE in wherever you can, but don't depend on it.

ThadiousGilberte

I am volunteering at the 15th Annual Mars Society Convention in Pasadena the first week of August. They are both speaking there and I may be in the position to oversee VIPs. Peter is going to be doing a book signing and probably be sticking around for the evening. That night the Curiosity rover is landing on Mars and we have some of the best seats on the west coast from the Convention floor. Elon, is accepting an award, and may be harder to get to. 30 seconds is all I can hope for with each of them but Peter more than Elon. I would want some paperwork to hand to them for a follow up, and a contact within the GVCS leadership, i.e. fundraising, PR, stuff like that.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I wanted to focus on the engineering of the project, and by that I mean: the way the GVCS is interconnected, is designed to use similar or identical parts, saves on construction and repair, and lets you build an industry from the ground up. The convention is full of Mars Colony dreamers and it is well known that putting people on Mars is Elon's goal with the founding of SpaceX. How does this tie into GVCS? There is no industry on Mars, just raw resources. You'll have to send tools and construction equipment, but not everything can be shipped and expansion should be constructed from local materials. Now, I know that in its current incarnation the GVCS is not built for a sub zero environment, .38 gravities, and an atmospheric pressure 1% of earths. These are not as important as the concept its self as fully integrated and easy to maintain industrial infrastructure for a small community. I don’t need anyone to adapt tech just yet, the original GVCS getting done and proving its worth here on the ground is the first step.

You see, the amazingness of the GVCS applies to much more than just the outdoors of the Midwest and the villages of the third world. It is a possible solution to one of the bigger hurdles of the Manned Mars program. In-situ resource utilization.

Sorry, got stars in my eyes for a second.

I'd like to see GVCS get more funding and I think I can convince Elon and Peter to take this to their friends.

On the other half, I'm a Navy reservist that got recalled for a year in Afghanistan. I'm working right now to get more details about my job, but from my current field I assume it is computer related. In my spare time I want to be in a shop learning to weld better and construction techniques, of which I hope to have access to very good subject matter experts.

Matt_Maier

Given their line of work I imagine they've already heard of OSE, but it's possible they haven't.

I work in the space career field, and I volunteer with OSE and Wikispeed, so I think I have a reasonably good handle on the differences between the two. Why would they contribute anything? What's in it for them? OSE has a distinctly "hippie" or "back to the Earth" vibe even if Marcin has a phd. I agree that what OSE is doing is important, but it will be difficult to tie it into any space-exploration goals. Squashing dirt into bricks might apply to colonizing Mars in principle, but in application it's the difference between a stone axe and semiconductors.

Exploration and colonization of other bodies, like the Moon and Mars, will absolutely require utilizing as many local resources as possible. We agree on that. And OSE is approaching things on Earth in the same kind of way, but convincing guys at the top of the space game to invest in people at the bottom of the agriculture game will be a hard sell. You MIGHT be able to get them to invest in Marcin. He's extensively educated and has been validated by getting support from established foundations and a TED fellowship. However, he hasn't demonstrated any particular aptitude for leadership or program management, let alone business.

If the talk with Musk and/or Diamandis goes well I can put you in contact with some of OSE's leadership.

As for the shop in Afghanistan, be careful about having a solution and looking around for a problem. It's one thing to want to learn new skills and do interesting things with them. It's another to have a situation that needs you to use your skills to do something. You seem to have the solution all ready to go, but no problem to solve. Have you ever been to Afghanistan before? Do you know of some are in which they're struggling that a workshop could help with?

ThadiousGilberte

Matt,<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I appreciate you helping me find the holes in my ideas, thanks.

I was hoping to convince them that OSE thinking was absolutely necessary to their own long term goals: making life multiplanetary. They envision small teams of dedicated professionals accomplishing this, not huge industries, one the surface, doing the work. At least, Elon does, and the people who he claims have inspired him, such as Kim Stanley Robinson. The cost of shipping a everything you need for full habitation for a small group is possible. This works for a science station, like Antarctica. But if you move beyond the outpost stage, and want to work toward en expansion of the base and the creation of a full industry to support a larger population, you can't just ship every tractor and dump truck you'll need across interplanetary space, until you suddenly have enough stuff to build a John Deer factory.

If you go at it as a fully integrated industrial setup, like the OSE's GVCS you can get large projects started an order of magnitude faster. I want to convince Elon and Peter that it's worth investing in OSE now for the payoffs down the line it can provide to their projects. The lessons we learn from OSE can be applied to designing equipment that can be constructed on Mars. It’s a long term goal, but these guys seem to think long term.

Can I have a contact for you that I can hand to Elon, or Peter? What is your role, you seem well spoken here.

Matt_Maier

Haha, sure. If Elon Musk or Peter Diamandis want to talk to me, I'll do that. Then catch a flight to wherever you are and buy you a beer.

blueback09 at gmail

Or, this is my business card page www.matthewpmaier.com

I'm volunteering my time to Wikispeed and OSE. I'd say the biggest things I've done are introduce Marcin (leader OSE) to Joe Justice (leader Wikispeed) and write the LifeTrac documentation. At the moment I'm working on the design of the open source car, which sits nicely in between Wikispeed and OSE. At first I thought the car should be the last thing anyone spends time developing. However, I came around to the realization that "car culture" is a huge untapped pool of potential open source advocates. Cars are a significant cultural trigger for the Western world. If we can demonstrate open source principles in a way that appeals to the gear heads, the whole thing can move a lot faster.

Okay, so, I agree that principles like modularity and integration are going to be important for human space exploration. And I agree that OSE is trying to apply those to a greater extent than most other organizations. However, I've been talking to people about these ideas for a while now and they either get it or they don't. I haven't figured out a way to explain it that forces the epiphany. Either they are already primed for it to click or, at best, they think it's "kind of interesting." To be honest, I saw OSE once a year before I joined. It seemed like an interesting idea, but the importance didn't "click" for me until I saw their video again a year later.

Both Musk and Diamandis are either hard-core business men or phenomenally lucky. I'm assuming the former. I doubt you'll be able to appeal to them on a business level. They probably get business offers every day and straight up ignore them if the source isn't near their level. You might be able to pitch support of OSE as a purely philanthropic action. It is a registered non-profit, and it's gotten support from respectable philanthropic organizations already. If you go that route, I suggest going for the BIG idea (they seem like big idea guys). Explain how OSE is developing a foundation of open source industrial and agricultural technology that will take everything the human race has learned in the last millennia and cut out all the waste and dead ends. OSE is shrinking it all down until a single village can process the raw materials around them into a MODERN civilization, with semiconductors and everything. Civilization in a bottle. From scratch to iPods. Or something like that. If they seem interested, then apply the concept to space exploration. If we can work out the kinks here on Earth we'll be a hell of a lot closer to being able to do something useful on Mars or the Moon. My take on it is that the open source approach is the only one that can possibly work in the sort of timeline Musk or Diamandis would be interested in. It's only starting to emerge, but open source hardware is regularly producing an order of magnitude decrease in cost and turning around new generations faster than any for-profit corporation. All the process needs is a seed. If they could help get the GVCS up and running it wouldn't matter how crappy the first generation was. It will quickly improve as people independently develop the technology and instantly share their developments with everyone else.

Actually, now that I think about it that way I could see them building the open source community in at the beginning. Mars one is already planning on financing trips to Mars primarily by turning it into a reality TV show. Diamandis thought about doing that for a moon trip. Mach30 is a non-profit working towards a fully open source space program. Anywho, remember that scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers have to make the square CO2 filters work in round holes? Well, imagine a trip to Mars. We already know that it will be a media circus. But not just that, we'll have networking tools that no one has even conceived of yet. If the people going to Mars run into a problem, why should they be limited to just the help of the engineers? If they are riding on an open source spacecraft, and they are hooked into the internet, then 3 billion people could help solve their problem. Back when men went to the Moon it pulled everyone together via TV, because that was what they had. When people go to Mars it will pull the human race together via the internet, because that's what we'll have.

The key to making open source hardware work for business is to be a manufacturer. Well, Musk and Diamandis are already more-or-less manufacturers. If they helped nurture the OSE specifically, and the open source hardware community in general, they could build all that cooperation and excitement and technical creativity into the program. By the time they would do something like that DARPA will probably be finished with their AVM project, so there will at least be a template for a program that could coordinate distributed inputs to a single technical project. http://youtu.be/N7mvQo0U2aQ?t=2m6s

That was kind of a brain dump. Whadaya think?

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