Wooster says he is passionate about human expansion into space. He’s a real rocket scientist, but he wants to erase some of the mystique surrounding that moniker. “Rocket science is seen as a very elite profession,” Wooster says, “but there are a lot of things needed in order to have a human base on Mars that can be done without a lot of rocket science itself.” He wants to open up opportunities for people in other professions to share what they know. “I feel there’s a large set of people who would work on these things if they had an opportunity.”

Before 1995, Wooster didn’t even know what Linux was, let alone open source software, but during his recent tenure as a research scientist at MIT, the concepts “gradually worked their way into my consciousness,” he says. “The thing that struck me was I noticed there were a lot of people who were very motivated about space — computer programmers, car designers, and even just high school kids. I realized that the open source model is a good way of contributing to it.”

Wooster says the community’s core group of about 15 people bring an aerospace background to the mix, “who know how to design spacecraft, but half of them don’t even know what PHP is. Right now we are looking for people who have a good understanding of the Web side of things.” Wooster is working on a hosting infrastructure he says is similar to SourceForge.net — a repository for specifications, drawings, documentation, and software — in addition to a wiki where participants can share and discuss information.

“We’re focused on building up the technical foundations of human activities in space, identifying the current barriers to those activities, and then coming up with engineered solutions to those barriers — but doing so in an open source manner. If, for example, I design a solar-powered system for use on Mars and do some testing in the lab, rather than just writing up a paper and publishing it in a journal or a .PDF format where it’s difficult to extract information, I would post all of the CAD files and the more detailed engineering analyses so someone else can come along and improve on my design — they don’t have to start from scratch. Over time, what will happen is that more and more people will get involved in these actitivies and we will make technical progress toward lowering the barriers to entry for someone who wants to set up a human base on Mars, or an orbiting outpost. I don’t actually see the group in the near term doing those types of things. This is much more of laying the foundations.”

Wooster says the group is flexible about the kinds of projects that it will host on DevelopSpace. “What I see happening is an organic growth, of sorts,” he says. “As long as the projects are related to space, people can come along with their own projects.” DevelopSpace is about providing a pre-established infrastructure for projects so that researchers not employed by large aerospace companies with existing labs and prototypes don’t have to constantly start from scratch. “It’s a lot easier for someone to start a new project and make progress on the real question at hand” with the proper tools already in place, Wooster says, such as plans for hardware design, circuit board layouts, drawings for life support modules, and structural analysis datasets.

Wooster doesn’t expect much help from aerospace companies, whose profits are based in closely held technologies. “I don’t see that many of the existing aerospace companies would want to embrace this to begin with,” he says. “It’s lowering the barriers to entry to their business and encourages new entrants.” But government agencies like NASA may show interest. “They’re more likely to come around earlier on, I would say. They don’t have to worry as much about competitors — and in many ways this thing could help them leverage the resources they do have to accomplish more. But the area I really see as the first growth area is people in universities — there’s a group of people who are supposed to be publishing their activities. And then there’s the general public.”

If you’re interested in contributing your skills to the DevelopSpace project, visit the site and sign up.

CRT has four full-time staff members, and they all do everything open source, says Keith Garner, strategic architect. “My boss, the vice president of CRT, codes as much or maybe more than I do on an average day,” Garner says. “It’s open source just for the fact of rapid development.” Garner and his boss, Mark Lesswing, have worked together at other companies. Garner says back in 1997, Lesswing used to be a “big OS/2 guy. I slowly got him converted over and he started to see the value, to see the ‘way,’ to understand the value of open source.”

When Lesswing applied for a job heading up the CRT, the exact function of the department was still up in the air. “They didn’t know exactly what it was going to do,” Garner says, but Lesswing came in preaching advocacy, education, and implementation, and that got them both a job. “We advocate to our members the technology they should be using and looking at, and we advocate to the vendors on their behalf. We go to the national, state, and local association meetings for anyone who wants to hear us yap and do educational talks,” he says. “We always said we would do stuff as open source, and we would do proof of concepts, full projects, find holes, and explore areas to help the industry as a whole.”

A large part of what the CRT team does is proof of concept. They create a low-cost, open source solution for realtors, and make the technology available to IT vendors that brokers hire to outfit their offices, and to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). For example, Garner and his team coded something they call Messenger, a VoIP-based technology that routes email from potential clients to realtors cell phones. According to Garner, a study found that the average response time from realtors communicating with clients via email was seven days. “By that time, the customer has moved on,” he says. Messenger, built on Asterisk, translates text entered at the realtor’s Web site into voice and phones it in so the agent can respond quickly. “The guy who was working on it before over-engineered it, and we’re simplifying it. The MLS in Texas is providing Messenger as a service to its members.”

Other projects, like NoScrape and reCaptcha, help keep bots — automated programs that access Web sites — from “scraping” confidential MLS data. Garner’s favorite project is ezRETS. RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) is an open standard for exchanging real estate database information. “ezRETS is an ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver that talks to RETS servers,” Garner says. “It allows someone on a Windows box to do queries against RETS from an application like Excel.” Database subscribers can create their own “pulls” to get custom information from the RETS server rather than relying on canned feeds. The ODBC driver makes it easier for the average realtor by letting them use familiar Windows applications to request data.

Garner says he and his colleagues are dedicated to the use of open source software. “We try, and we do succeed, to walk the walk as much as talk the talk,” he says. “I’ve been running Linux since 1994.” Garner is hesitant to talk about the Macintosh laptop that will soon replace his longtime Linux notebook. “It’s kind of a big step for me. But right now, I’m doing a lot of work that OS X just does, like discovering external monitors. Wireless could be better on Linux. It’s a little painful sometimes. But since I travel so much, there’s those areas where I’m going to have to move away from [open source] a little, unfortunately.”