Papermoon: A Space-Grade Linux for the NewSpace Era

TOKYO — When I worked for NASA in the 1980s, every satellite and spaceship that went into orbit ran one-off, hand-coded, semi-proprietary programs. This approach was painful, expensive, and sometimes disastrous, as with the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 due to a software blunder.

Things have changed. In his “Space Grade Linux” keynote at the Open Source Summit Japan conference, Ramón Roche, a longtime robotics developer and general manager of the Dronecode Foundation, told how Linux and open source software are becoming the…