Dear Debian Astro fellows, I began contributing to Debian not long ago and I couldn't be more excited when I found about your existence. I wanted to express my concerns about a free and open source space mission analysis tool, so you could give your opinion and advice. For those of you who don't know of what I'm talking about, I would like a software capable of simulating a full mission of a space vehicle. This means getting not only where the vehicle is at any given time, but calculating, for instance, which one is the most efficient trajectory to reach a destination given a set of parameters, how much fuel it takes, which type of engine should be used, how much sun light will the vehicle receive during its fly time, how often and for how long will the vehicle be visible from any given ground earth station (or from another vehicle),... I was lucky enough to use STK 7 during my studies, which is a commercial software [1] capable of doing pretty much everything suggested above, if you can afford the license of course. The only open source alternative that I know of (please point me in the right direction if I'm mistaken here) is GMAT [2] which is developed by the NASA and unfortunately licensed under the NASA Open Source License Agreement, which is for sure incompatible with the GPL [3] and probably also with the DFSG. I've also searched through the Debian Astro packages and I didn't find anything like this. Therefore it seems I'm faced with two options: * Packaging GMAT, even though it probably won't make it into main but into non-free. * Writing a new program from scratch, which, for a non-expert programmer like me, feels not only non-viable but also like reinventing the wheel. So: * Could this idea be interesting for the Debian Astro (or more generally, Debian) project? * What do you think would be the best way to achieve this? * Am I missing any other options? Does Debian Astro have a program like these among its packages that I am not aware of? * Should I settle for using non-free software? Thanks a lot, Rock Storm -- [1] http://www.agi.com/products/stk/ [2] http://gmatcentral.org/ [3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NASA
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