A web-based mission control framework by NASA

I&#x27;ve worked for the European Space Agency and EUMETSAT and it&#x27;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&#x2F;UI, idiosyncrasies and bugs.<p>I&#x27;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).

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&#x27;t hesitate to contact us using the email address on the website as well.

Open MCT is fun to work with. We&#x27;re using it as an IoT dashboard at our hackerspace:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bergie.iki.fi&#x2F;blog&#x2F;nasa-openmct-iot-dashboard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bergie.iki.fi&#x2F;blog&#x2F;nasa-openmct-iot-dashboard&#x2F;</a>

Definitely planning on using this on my next space mission.

&quot;Houston, we have serious problems here. We&#x27;re tumbling end over end. We&#x27;re disengaged from the Agena.&quot;<p>&quot;Try increasing left-pad.&quot;<p>(But seriously, this is really cool and I&#x27;m looking forward to trying the Kerbal Space Program plugin.)

Does SpaceX use similar tool? KSP does[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hudsonfoo&#x2F;kerbal-openmct" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hudsonfoo&#x2F;kerbal-openmct</a>

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&#x27;s.<p>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.<p>I guess they&#x27;d have to make it as easy as possible because the project might not have many uses outside of NASA.

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 &quot;the launch computer has taken over the countdown&quot; thing (technically a no-no but it&#x27;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&#x27;s a very fun and educational hobby but can get $$

It&#x27;s great that all dependencies have been made to satisfy stringent NASA software assurance standards. A great day for entire NPM ecosystem.

I don&#x27;t know how I feel or what I think about running mission control from a browser. Seems like it&#x27;d probably lead to lower defects to build something very simple very close to the metal — and <i>probably</i> 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 &amp;c. from the critical path. The disadvantage of course would be running homegrown software which performs some (but not all!) of those functions.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, though. I&#x27;m certainly open to being persuaded.

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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cosmosrb.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cosmosrb.com&#x2F;</a>

Great to see this getting open-sourced but let&#x27;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.

Looks like their live demo site <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openmct-demo.herokuapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openmct-demo.herokuapp.com&#x2F;</a> has an error.

I recently uploaded a video in youtube from Jay Trimble&#x27;s talk about Open MCT from the Open Source Cubesat Workshop 2018 that took place in Madrid. Feel free to check it out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y6Dh74INR_I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y6Dh74INR_I</a>

On the one hand modernizing such things is really, really good initiative. On the other hand JavaScript&#x2F;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.

It uses a lot of CPU for no apparent reason.

I guess it is time to say goodbye to Netbeans based UIs used at NASA then.<p>The UI demo does actually look quite good.

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

Great, now I can launch that space mission I&#x27;ve been planning to since forever.

you lost me at Angular sorry...

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&#x2F;7.<p>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.