 So, hi, I'm Lephidios Kosmas, you can call me Alcosa, it's usually hard to pronounce my name. So, I'm representing the Libre Space Foundation, I'm its vice chairman, and I'm going to talk about how open source actually empowers getting the space, the Libre way. So, before starting, I have to say that I'm really, really happy to be here. I've been a KD user for the last 23 years or so, so, yeah, since KD2 came out. So, I'm really happy to be with you, I never actually expected to be here with you. So, how all this started? The thing is that as most interesting stuff starts with a small group of people, friends, whatever you like, like that met at the local Hikerspace in Athens, Greece, which is focused on open source technologies. That started around 2011. At 2014, during the Space and Challenge Hikathon, we started the SATNOX, the satellite ground station network. Same year, we won the Hikaday prize, approximately 200K thousands. So, we had to decide what to do with all that money, which was a lot during the worst economic crisis in our country. So, we say, hey, let's make a non-profit foundation to use all that resources in something we love and share back with the community. So, 2017, we actually had in orbit our first satellite, UPISAT, which we did for the University of Patras. And 2022, our first open source satellite deployer, just this September. So, all this work is powered by vision, by open source and openness in general, open governance, open hardware, open data. And what we seek to do is to make space accessible to all. To do so, we develop stuff from ground stations to satellite missions. And we adhere to a set of values. We have our own manifesto, if you'd like, mostly inspired by the Mozilla manifesto and the outer space treaty. And the whole idea is that we use ZPL version 6, say ZPL, LZPL, CERN licenses, open source data, and we adhere to trying to document everything, all our processes, all our governance, the way we do stuff on our documentation efforts and our repositories. For an organization that works in space, that's a little bit weird. Most such organizations, especially the ones not funded by government, don't do so. Because most of them are either for profit companies or they are just commonly not very open. You see what we do, actually. Being an open source organization allowed us to create some interesting projects, like Satnox, like UPSat, you can actually see in orbit. It was launched by the International Space Station, so you get a nice picture from an astronaut. And we've finally tried to do a lot of hardware development, mostly, nowadays, and a lot of software development that will create more open source data for space. Why do we do so? And why do we believe that's the way forward? Well, first and foremost, open source allows for rapid prototyping and rapid iterations. For example, the Satnox communication system. The little module we created, which is designed for CUBESat signal analysis and communications, it's actually also forked by the good people from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki next door from here. They use it, they forked it, they managed to use our design in their own future CUBESat, and that's really interesting because that's not the norm in space. We've seen that this design can also be used for ionospheric disturbance analysis, which for us is interesting because we didn't thought about it. Some other people thought about it, and because it's open source and you can actually see how it works, they can say, you know something, you can also do that with that hardware. We never thought about that. It also allows for global collaboration, meaning that the Satnox network now has more than 400 ground stations in 50 countries all over the world. You can actually get data from Taiwan, from Russia, from the United States of America, from the Azora islands in the middle of the freaking ocean, which is really interesting in my humble opinion because that's something usually only large superpowers could do a few years ago. Nowadays, with open source and a huge community, you can actually do stuff and lower the barriers of entry because, for example, for a team or a person to participate in Satnox, you can actually need Raspberry Pi, Q antennas, a simple RTOSDR, and you're good to go. I mean, I have one of these things on my rooftop, and it's simple, and it's a way to give back to the community and a way to participate in a space project. And also it's a way to participate in a project that you have really interesting. So what we might understand is that using open source in space is not just developing open source. We prefer to dog food open source if you like, meaning that you have to use open source solutions all over your stack. You have to use open source solutions for daily operations, for community operations, for development needs. It's not only something, I'm going to create an open source community and use everything closer. That doesn't go a long way. You use, sometimes you have to actually assist the development and actually lead the way to get the features you need. And have daily interaction with the open source project to use in order to get some of their good practices and good ideas. I'm not meaning only about code, I'm not meaning about, ah, yes, they did a really nice thing in that commit. I'm going to get that. There are good practices and good community management ideas or good implementations of things among several projects. And having interactions with other projects, you can actually get what other people are doing and try to copy the right stuff or the stuff that suits you. And let's be honest, using open source solutions can allow for underoperability within the organization, especially an organization that's mostly remote and distributed around the world, and with external entities. For example, we are working with the European Space Agency, we are working with Harvard, we are working with several space agencies across the world. Having open source tools allows us for better communication with our partners. And there are some of our, of the open source projects we use, of course we use no Linux, apparently. But the thing is that we try to use as much as possible across the board. But there are challenges. And being an open source organization in space creates some difficulties, maybe. Because let's face it, space is hard, it can be really hard. Orbital hardware has a few ways to be fixed, and as it's launched, you can't do anything about it. You can't go say, ah, you know something, that screw won't go there. Well, but lack. But open source can provide a solution for more robust systems. There are several regulations, several standards you have to follow, but following standards. So you can actually create frameworks around them, you can work with the standard and actually start to implement ways, to find ways to implement the standards, as long as they are not locked in a proprietary way. We are seeing these coming time and time again. There are regulatory issues. And what we believe is that as long as you try to be open and try to implement stuff openly, you will provide solutions for all. And that's key. To be honest, space used to be the domain of superpowers, of large corporations, of people with resources. Miniaturization allowed lowering the bars of entry. Open source, in the other hand, can be a catalyst in lowering the bar of entry. Now you can build your own kip set in your local hiker space, and you can actually go in Athens and see people building satellites in the local hiker space. It's a little bit crazy. Because you can actually see people working on a space rated hardware, while other people are hacking something really silly. Which is really nice in my humble opinion. The industry, this industry at least, it's not the only one, that is full of proprietary solutions and secrecy. Secrecy has been a staple for space many, many years now. And nowadays we see that the impact to innovation is so huge, that traditional entities, private, public entities, are keen on taking out openness. They've not yet gone full open source, not all of them at least. But you can see that the European Space Agency starts to promote open source. NASA has open source repositories. There are processes, there's work to be done, and we are trying to pressure things in going forward in the open source way. But let's face it, space is also a very capital intensive industry. It needs huge amounts of money to put hardware in orbit. Ridiculous amounts sometimes. So that impacts innovation and impacts open source too. Because we are used to open source creators to create something and have it on our hands, able to use it without any intermediates, without having to invest huge amounts of money to have it even work on its own. This is not the case in space, but the case is that because it's so capital intensive, there are opportunities to actually be able to fund open source development. We are actually an organisation that's sustainable, has around 15 to 20 employees. Most of them are engineers. I think I'm the less engineering one. And the thing is that what we see is that we are able to sustain an organisation for the last eight and last years. We believe that certain, the same state, is KD, isn't indicative of the common grounds open source organisations like KD, both fostered communities, both tried to democratise, if you like, access technology and their thriving community. We couldn't build stuff without our community. We couldn't build stuff without open source tools like KitLab, like Big Blue Button. We couldn't be the way we are without being collaborative and transparent in what we do. What you are trying to achieve and what you are trying to build is similar to an extent in what any open source organisation does, being open, promoting open source culture, openness in general, and creating a set of open tools for people to use. Of course there are differences, because, let's face it, as I said before, and I'll say it again, and I'll reiterate it continuously, space is hard. There are domain-specific challenges, there are tests you have to do, there are regulations you have to fill out, out there, nice. And while working with that kind of environment, you may feel a little bit changed in how things work. You may think that I can't do the things I would like to do, because I want to break some stuff. You can't, it's space that won't let you break stuff in orbit. And in general they don't let you break stuff around in space agencies. I don't know why. Most of our work is purpose-driven. That's not really similar to what KD does, because KD actually, in my humble opinion at least, correct me if I'm wrong, KD actually provides a generic computing experience. You can use KD for whatever you'd like. That's a strong selling point of KD. I'm a KD user, but my use scenarios were different across the many years I've used it. I used to use KD to just browse. I used KD to develop stuff, and it wasn't nice for anyone involved. Now I use KD for developing open-source hardware in space. The thing is that what projects like KD do is provide a very important common ground for us, a very important infrastructure to work with. We can actually use stuff around. And especially the way we see it, the way I'm seeing it at least, is that KD is flexible enough to adjust to my special user needs as they change. This is really important in the way I see it. As I said, though, we need to engage the community in different ways than KD, meaning that as we work with a very specialized bunch of people, scientists, space engineers, space agencies, they need engagement in a different way of things. You need more formal engagement sometimes. You need to be a little bit more in the box, if you like. But that thing also changes in the space industry, because the space industry has learned that you can't innovate always in the box. The other thing with Libre Space is that our deadlines are very hard, because honestly, you can't say to the launch provider, you know something, guys? Can we postpone launching that big rocket of yours, because my hardware is not ready yet? Can we? No, I can't say that. I can't say I haven't passed the QA measures they needed for their hardware, their software, because this has to be done. I can't say I didn't do environmental testing, because I have to do it. I have to vibrate the thing before it goes on a rocket. And the thing is that in contrast with KD, we do have a hardware commitment. We do develop hardware. Developing hardware can be hard, but also creates a focus on a singular platform. This isn't the case for KD, because KD has to be used on any of these things, or hopefully in the future, it could be used on our phones or in any device we use. This is different, but also really interesting in the way such a community must interact. KD has to work with a million devices and a million of systems doing different user scenarios, which can be really complicated or really extreme. Yes, there are ten users out there that use this weird driver, and you have to figure out a way to use that on your system and create a UI around it and have an experience similar to other KD users' experience. For me, it's crazy. I don't know how you people do it. So me, but also it's something that is out of our world. We can't believe that it's done, but it's done. We've seen it. We've seen it on our own machines, to be honest. And the other difference is that when you people work and develop KDE, developing KDE is more or less instant. You do stuff. You create your binary and you test it. I do stuff. I ship them away. I beg the gods or whatever to not skip the launch day because, you know, the weather is bad. Oh, poor you. Next month. And the other thing is that you stay in the unknown. You don't know how stuff will happen. Sometimes without your own, I don't know, input, without your own, without you messing around stuff, you have that. That wasn't pretty. I mean, that was a community, a bunch of people. Some people here, I can see that have seen and worked on the code of this thing. There used to be a Picobus pocket cube launcher there and two really small satellites of Libre Space Foundation and four Spanish satellites on the Picobus so we decided to assist our friends in Spain. So we got the thing in the launch pod. It started flying and kaboom. After one minute or so on the flight, rockets started to wobble and they pressed the button. People worked on this. Worked hard to make this thing work and it didn't. And that's a challenge faced by such organizations that are focused in Spain. You might work a lot and things will fail. And failure is an option. Well, if they didn't press the button, it would be a worst failure so I understand that. So what we learned so far on our journey in space in the last eight years, longer than a Star Trek set of seasons. So first and foremost, we learned that sky is not the limit for open source. Open source can be everywhere. It can be in orbit, it can be in Mars, as JPL showed on their little helicopter. It's really nice. Challenges can foster innovation. The challenges and the regulations and all that regulatory framework we have to work might allow you to change your mind, be a little bit more flexible than others and try to implement stuff in a better way. The way we see it, I think one of the most important things we have to take into account is community participation. We couldn't be here. We couldn't build a satellite ground station globally. It's bigger than NASA without a community, without people building their own ground stations, without people suggesting, ah, you know something, guys. You have to do that because that would be more efficient for that driver over there. I mean, come on. I couldn't have thought that. And it also allows for input in domains that you are not used to work with. I am not a space engineer. I'm trained in healthcare, for fuck's sake. I'm a nurse, actually. So I used to be at least. And having people with domain-specific knowledge, or even more, non-domic-specific knowledge, but knowledge in certain characteristics of physics or stuff like that, can allow for innovative solutions and can allow for a community to go further. In my humble opinion, that collaboration sounds like the collaboration. Nice. Collaboration can have a geometric impact, of course. Meaning that you can actually see that it's not linear. After we've seen that when there is an amount of people in the project that starts getting a little bit more crowded, has more commits from other people outside the regular... Things change and go faster and faster. Sometimes it's difficult to keep up, but they're faster and faster. And you see that the project has started going slow, mostly working, because it's crazy fast. Because the community is pushing the project forward without you even expecting it to go as fast as it goes. And we actually learned that we have to learn from our peers, learn from other open-source organizations, learn from other space organizations, get the knowledge, an experience, and wisdom, if you like, of the open-source community. We've seen it with other organizations, too. I think we see it with KDE. You people have experienced stuff we haven't. You've seen how difficult it is to migrate to a new environment. We've lived that with KDE 3-4, and we survived it. But the idea is that you learn, and the right things your peers do, and the wrong things your peers do, are actually a way to learn stuff. And we believe that an open-source organization, like ours, or like you, has to learn from the mistakes and the right choices of their peers. Because we have a great thing, meaning that what you do, and what Mozilla does, Debbie and I, is actually a learning process for all of us. You can't implement the same things always, because we are not the same organization, certainly. But you can actually learn stuff from each other. And you can also collaborate either directly or through umbrella organizations going forward. We have, in my humble opinion, and I think that's shared with many people in the KDE community, and other open-source communities. We have to collaborate on common challenges. We have to collaborate on challenges such as policy coming in our countries, in the United States of America. And we have to learn to figure out how to protect our users and protect open-source. I'm open for your questions. Really would like to open a dialogue and start chatting, because, okay, doing a presentation is cool, but chatting is better. Of course, you can always send me an email, a telcos at Libre Space to just say, hello, chat, and discuss whatever issues you may have. But I'm open for your questions, if you'd like. Shoot me. Let me see. Yes, that one. So it has the Kaikat logo on it. And the question is, how much of that is going on? How much do you have to design? How much hardware do you have to design and make yourself? Or can most of the hardware that goes into the satellite come off the shelf? Well, here's the thing. We don't actually design ICs yet. I would say. That is always interesting, and if my engineers would have their own thing, I'm pretty sure they would design their own ICs to do certain kind of stuff. But bear that, all the design is custom. Excluding components like that SMA thing or that screwdriver they are, or, you know, resistance and stuff like that. The design, the PCBs, the metallic designs, everything is custom. And it's open source. Designed with Kaikat and Freakat. On an open source repository, you can actually download and build it yourself, put it on your own rocket, and call it a day. It's a really interesting project. Yeah, that's a really interesting project, actually. That's SIDLOC. SIDLOC is a satellite identification and location protocol. We designed this for the European Space Agency, and its thing is that it actually emits a beacon that allows for... It's not a satellite, it's spacecraft, spacecraft identification and location. So why this thing is interesting? It emits a beacon, a certain kind of signal which allows for identifying a satellite or a spacecraft easily and allows it to be located easily using math, mostly. So the interesting thing is that having an open source protocol is cool. Having a protocol that is actually implemented in an open source way is way cooler. And that's the way we should work. Because if we went out there and built a proprietary solution, what's the meaning? Why? Why should anybody adopt such a thing? It's, to me, it's five by five centimeters. It's cute. And this design, this actual design will go in Ariane 6. And it's an inaugural flight and will actually allow us to track Ariane 6 using satellite. And yes, you have to use KICAD on that. And yes, you have to use KICAD on that. And yes, you have to do everything open source if you are willing to do something that's impactful for the space industry. If you're just trying to make a buck, yes, go full proprietary. I don't care. But if you're trying to create something that will have an impact to people, to universities, to universities, to even corporations, someone trying to build their own satellite because they're making something. Yes, you have to go fully open. And let them do their commits and let them do their forks. And have fun. Other questions? Yes, please. You mentioned ground stations a couple of times. What is a ground station and is that something that we as people living on Earth would want to set up in our backyards? And what does it do that will help people? Yes. So a ground station can be that city over there which is not that big. Something like that. I have to admit that there is also a bigger ground station in the network. The Dwingelio Telescope in Netherlands is actually a southern ground station which is a little big for my backyard. I don't have such a big backyard. It's a little bit bigger than my house, actually. So the thing is that people create southern ground stations or actually make their own or use all their type of hardware used by radio amateurs to build one because they like to share data with their community. Some people find that interesting because it can actually be an easy weekend project for them. It wasn't easy for me but I'm not good with black and black kids at all. But the thing is that people like to assist other communities and other university teams. Most satellites a ground station actually receives data from a satellite. It only has 5-10 minutes per day to actually track the satellite. So if there is a university team like the university team at the next door that needs data they can use my own ground station they can use my friend's ground station in the United States or they can use a ground station in China in Taiwan they are both in the United States or in Russia and actually two staff. So in that case they mostly like to assist other communities. So regarding hardware as far as I know most of the staff is designed to go to space have to be subjected to very rigorous testing and the testing equipment to do that is very expensive and also proprietary under even the specifications most of the times from my experience even the specifications like dimensions of a vacuum chamber for example around the NDA2 do you have any solutions you are doing yourself in order to reach the same standard that is required? That's a great almost insider you of our project So here's the thing He's literally from the university next door Yes, I know I know him okay I know people So here's the thing Yes We are trying to have our own We are trying to build our own vacuum chambers We are trying to build our own clean rooms and we want this all to be open source documented. Right now what we do is go to the University of Catalonia and do stuff there and we pay stuff to do stuff there. We have to pay stuff to do environmental testing we have to pay stuff to do vibration checks and in the future we hope we will be able to have our own stack and the stack available to open source projects in general and an infrastructure physical infrastructure that is an open source project can send their own hardware to be tested hopefully with a person together to monitor the procedure because I'm not doing this Yeah, other questions So I have another similar question I suppose of the collaboration with different projects and being open source is amazing and kind of have you been able to have any success with getting some of these proprietary companies to open source their stuff so kind of like coming from the other direction No Here's the thing Especially in space Space as I said before is a very very kind of thing and people tend to be very protective of their presumed IP It's usually not something very interesting Sometimes you've seen devices you've seen hardware that are used around and sold by big companies that serve so much money for that Why? It's so simple On the other hand Yes, but that has orbital pedigree as they say because it's been there in the work so it's hard whatever the hell we want for that The main thing is that these companies most of these companies see that there might be another way to do stuff Interestingly the space agencies say that there is another way to do stuff because the space agencies want to protect their own interests and their interests of the people they represent So maybe the space agencies say yes, I need that open source and usually that's where we come and say ok let's work together with the community let's work together with large integrators maybe I won't say names yet because I haven't signed anything but if you start to see people start looking about open source and space they see that it might make sense it's not a good fleet for our business plan but yeah maybe some other time we'll see but things change the guys from next door they've seen it already they've seen it they already used some of our hardware right then they already fought it and they already put it on their own way and they've seen they might even go forward in making their own open source stuff because we are cool but how many people are cool I've seen recently I think it was quite bizarre a cube set from Ecuador I think that recently got released as an open source project and it's trapped and it happens you can actually see a really nice graphic display working in space it's really cool and the thing I see is that we might see change from university things first pushing the envelope forward making open source solutions because they need them to work better and because let's be honest about it the guys next door they might go to the industry they might go somewhere else they might change career become artists but the thing is that the source code has to remain there they're a public funded university they need to use their creation for the betterment of everyone else one other questions thank you we're sort of out of time so I'm going to use my session chair position to ask the last question oh you've gone to space with open source where are you going to go next well till we are going to space but the thing is that we only reach lower orbit right okay there's plenty of space beyond low earth orbit thank you thank you to all of you