Printing Out Rover Models
NASA GRC Solicitation: Curiosity Rover Scale Models
“NASA/GRC has a requirement for two (2) high quality 1/10th scale models and one (1) 1/5th scale model of the Curiosity Rover. NASA/GRC intends to purchase the items from Scale Model Company on a sole source basis due to the proprietary restrictions on drawings.”
Keith’s note: “Proprietary restrictions on drawings”? Gee, I wonder were this company got the data for the drawings of Curiosity in the first place? (Likely) answer: one way or another it all comes from NASA – even if the company did additional work on the drawings for their own uses. Too bad NASA has to spend lots of money on these models. There is little, if any, incentive at NASA to find cheaper ways to procure things like this since the expensive way is the way things have always been done. I wonder how much they are paying for these models? If I ask NASA PAO what the models cost they will almost certainly refuse to tell me and will make me file a FOIA request.
More or less every NASA center has 3-D printers these days and is experimenting with 3-D printing of satellite and rocket engine components. Why not take NASA’s Curiosity drawings and make them open source? There’s a large, growing DIY / “Maker” community who’d just love to do this for free. Then anyone (including NASA) can just print the models out – at a variety of scales – in a variety of materials – on an as-needed basis. Not only would this provide a huge audience with a chance to get a more intimate understanding of how these rovers work, it would also end up costing less money to make these models that NASA just loves to spend money on.
That said, I am sure the ITAR enforcers will find reasons why you can’t release things like this – even if the schematics simply show the outside of components – not their internal design. Yet nothing stops a company like Scaled Model Company from producing a model on their own – one of sufficient fidelity that NASA itself wants to buy it.
– 3-D Printing and Space, NASAHackspace
– 3D Printed CubeSat, Fabbaloo
– PrintSat – An Amateur Radio 3D Printer CubeSat, Southgate
– 3D Printing of cubesat structure, YouTube
– NASA 3D prints rocket parts — with steel, not plastic, ExtremeTech
I think the point is not that any proprietary restriction would prevent NASA from producing models themselves, but that it would cost more for them to produce such models than to contract the work to a firm with expertise in model-building. And they aren’t considering other bidders because they have limitations on who can receive the plans from which the models would be built (probably due to export controls).
Read my post. I am almost certain the DIY/3-D printing community would happily create the drawings if they were available to anyone as open source files that anyone can print. We’re not talking about making 1:1 copies of Curiosity, but rather small scale models. NASA thinks that everything needs to cost money – and they do not understand the rapidly growing “Maker” community.
1:5th scale is still pretty big (e.g almost a meter on a side). You’re not going to be printing that out on your 3d printer. Your best bet for this kind of thing would be to get the 3d models that are used for the digital renderings and animations you see. They have reasonably good detail, but not to the point of export control problems. Why not ask JPL for them? Either it’s a simple matter of getting the files, or there’s some complex intellectual property rights issue that will take a while to resolve; e.g. it’s not unheard of to contract to have something developed, particularly software, where you get “government purpose rights” which are a long way from “open source, public domain”.
You can parse the object(s) to be printed, print parts and then put them together. As for asking JPL, I might just do that. But based on past experience (I asked for Galileo drawings) they will say no, make me file a FOIA, explain why I need/want things, and then try and charge me money for the drawings.
Well, yes.. Assuming the files are not bound up in IP issues (JPL is part of CalTech, so Bayh-Dole Act comes into play), it’s still not free to put them in a form suitable for public distribution (if nothing else, someone has to spend time walking it through the release process). Outreach probably has the budget for it, but it also might be a simple resource availability issue. The raw files might be understandable only to the one person who created them, and that person is busy on other tasks of notionally higher priority; so even if you have the budget, the personnel aren’t available. The person who built the files probably wasn’t “building for distribution” but was “building for immediate use”.
I sympathize with your desires, but as with many things, things get prioritized, and meeting a formal requirement usually takes precedence over meeting “nice to have”, so if it costs more (or more likely, takes longer) to make it releasable, then project management might decide to “defer it to later”.
Again, I suspect there are legal issues for NASA in giving away detailed drawings of the rover. Not because it is itself a military project but because it incorporates dual-use technology that is subject to export controls. These restrictions are probably stupid in this case and yet they could be relatively difficult to overcome. If you want to criticize NASA for not putting a higher priority on this goal, that’s one thing, but if someone just wants a scale model of the rover and doesn’t want to confront the entire bureaucracy, I can hardly blame them for just trying to get the job done in a simple and straightforward way.
David,
I suspect you’re on the right track (but I’m only guessing). I had a situation years ago where it was impossible to get an accurate scale model of a particular American fighter jet made. Surprisingly, the problem wasn’t with export or classification, but simply because of one paragraph in the procurement contract for a comm instrument made by an Italian company which prohibited handing out copies of the package details (the assertion was that frequencies could be reverse engineered from the dimensions of certain external components). Everybody admitted that it wasn’t a likely scenario, and there were other ways to determine the frequencies anyhow, but the contract had long been signed and the cost to put through an engineering change and a waiver could have bought you a nice new car. so we couldn’t do it.
Steve
It might be that Scale Model Company has already invested the time to create model building drawings (i.e. what parts to make, any 3D printing for little detail stuff), and that they sell a 1/5th scale MSL for the recurring cost (i.e. stamp out the parts and assemble). Any other bidder would have to make construction drawings from scratch.
I suppose they could have put it out for a competitive procurement and selected on the basis of price. That would be tricky, because you’re looking for a piece of visual artwork, and you’d have to evaluate the previous work of the bidders to see if what they’re proposing is at the standard you want. There really aren’t any objective standards you could point to for evaluation, are there?
Agreed but at the end of the day they either used NASA drawings or reverse engineered drawings from NASA photos. Or both. Why can’t NASA simply post things (minus anything that violates ITAR) such that anyone can develop CAD/3D files?
I think they can’t do that because the law permits them to release documents to vendors who have a reason to receive them and who sign a license agreement, but don’t permit them to release the same documents publicly to everyone. Maybe those laws and regulations should be changed, but that’s primarily an issue for Congress, not NASA.
There are plenty of photos out there.
Drawings suitable for model building aren’t something that would be produced normally. You have probably thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of drawings that were used to build MSL, and I can guarantee that it is a non-trivial effort to just figure what a minimal set would be to build models from. After all, you might have an interface control drawing that defines the relative position of an instrument on curiosity, but the actual external description of the instrument is probably spread across a dozen drawings, if not more. Don’t forget the “a dimension shall occur on one and only one drawing” issue.
Your best bet is the solid modeling files, either from the animators, or some of the STEP files used to do fit checks and the like.
Both of those are usually “intermediate work products” as opposed to “released drawings”, and so, it costs a fair amount to figure out what you might release. Don’t forget, too, that a lot of the mechanical design and stuff was done years ago, and the person who had all those handy intermediate files might not even be employed at JPL any more, so that makes it even more challenging.
This isn’t unique to JPL or NASA. It’s a perpetual problem similar to “back annotation” in semiconductor design. You make the original mfr drawings, you build the widget, doing red-lines. The red-lines are in the configuration controlled repository, but turning the “as built” back into a model is usually not done.
Keith,
Architectural drawings for something like a skyscraper are compose of hundreds of master and related (x-ref) files, without which the master won’t even open. I can’t imagine something like a mars lander documentation in terms of drawing complexity. I would guess that there are staff people responsible for nothing but keeping the drawings and the referencing straight (but I don’t know). Throw in referenced work from other suppliers across the country, and this gets hairy.
I know nothing about the security or other issues. But I do know about drawing. If someone wanted, say, to make a model of a modern skyscraper (OK, admittedly, in this case photos will be a better fit), developing a set of exportable drawings would be non-trivial, as they say. It’s bad enough with structural, HVAC, interiors, blah, blah, blah. A mars rover? with tolerances?
There’s a sense out there by those not working with computer generated design and construction drawings that the computer has made it easy. I assure you that this is not the case. Not even close. In my profession it’s arguable that the computer has made the process more complex, not less.
I’m curious as to what these three models are needed for. JPL already built, or had built, quite a few mock-ups and partials for extensive testing, particularly to test their new landing method. Having served their various purposes, they’re probably all sitting in storage somewhere now.
Also, JPL has full scale copies (two I believe, one for sure) of MSL that they use for driving testing before committing the actual MSL to a new set of commands. This combined with the fact that the MSL is already on Mars doing it’s job, makes me wonder why more scale models are required at this time, at a cost that’s not going to be competitive (given that the single source buy is almost certainly going to happen). Curiosity indeed.
Steve
One big full scale mockup is sitting at JPL in the lobby of Building 180. The others are probably being used for outreach, etc. They’re certainly not in storage. I’ll bet there’s a list a mile long to check them out for lectures, talks, and the like.
The full scale system that drives around the Mars Yard is being used on a day to day basis as you note.
But this is NASA Glenn Research Center buying models. Most likely, they’re doing it for outreach reasons. Hands on exhibits for educators to use, for instance. Isn’t GRC putting together some sort of Science Center sort of thing (or supporting that in the Cleveland area)?
I assume the models are for display and publicity purposes, not for engineering work. I also imagine that we’re not talking about more than single-digit thousands of dollars. I would question the assumption that sole-source contracts mean less competitive pricing. Often competitive bidding is a lot more expensive.
When I tried to get info for a MER model I was building a few years back, I was told one of two stories. It seems that they picked one a random whenever I asked.
A) Sorry we can’t tell you, ITAR and all that.
B) Sorry we can’t tell you, JPL has an exclusive marketing deal with Hotwheels.
Exclusive marketing deal with Hotwheels???
Didn’t my Tax dollars pay for this??????
JOE Q TAX PAYER
the speculation in the comments here reminds me of a comment on an earlier story about MSL where a SpaceX cheerleader was asserting that NASA was going to have to share all the data and then Musk will simply make a better and cheaper one. more than likely the “proprietary” marking has nothing to do with JPL. it more than likely has a lot to do with the contractor in Denver who built the hardware. see folks, while NASA may pay for stuff it still includes the contractor proprietary information. and that is usually the key information to make it work.
and that is why most companies develop internal technical expertise on a wide array of relevant topics rather than rely on asking NASA for all the data from a previous similar design.
The mere mention of the word “model” make me hope we are eventually talking about me buying a cardboard box filled with sheets of tiny plastic parts I can detach and glue together! Please, please tell me this will be a spin-off from this project!!
The DIY 3D printer community is all over it. The Mars Exploration Rovers too.
http://www.thingiverse.com/…
http://www.thingiverse.com/…