> AMSAT (the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation) is working with its
> partners on a Cubesat (4 inch cube satellite) to be launched in the next
> few months. We need experienced help programming an MPS-430 (TI
> Microcontroller).
Is that the same as the MSP430 (see Wikipedia)? I see references to both.
> If you are a U.S. citizen (sorry, ITAR and out of my hands) and are
> interested in helping, please email me directly.
Can you describe (or point to a URL for) the specific need for ITAR
restrictions on this software? I looked, but found nothing on the
AMSAT site.
ITAR is never out of our hands. We beat these bastards on encryption,
and we can beat them on satellites too. All it takes is a global,
scientifically published, shared effort.
There are Cubesat's being built all over the world. They don't follow
US ITAR rules. The next rocket they'll launch on is in India. Clue?
If you live outside the US, and you program this, AMSAT is free to
use it. AMSAT is free to import code.
This is a large part of how we beat the bastards. We just stopped
writing crypto code in the US, or buying crypto code from US
companies. We started contracting with foreigners. ITAR prohibited
us from teaching them to write it, but they could learn to write it
themselves, and we could pay them to import the results. (And they
were free to ship the code to any other country in the world -- unlike
us.) Smart people among the billions of non-US citizens figured out
for themselves that they could learn to write it (whether or not we
paid them). The center of crypto software development moved outside
the US. Which is exactly what the ITAR rules were trying to prevent.
E.g. Europeans designed a better replacement for DES, which became AES
in a fair, global competition. Eventually even the thick heads among
the spooks got the message, and the crypto export rules changed.
The sooner we have MPS-430 Cubesat software that's built in a free
country, available to any space experimenter worldwide, published
under a free license, the sooner we'll all have access to space.
John Gilmore
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