NASA's Software Catalog offers hundreds of new software programs for free | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Software Catalog offers hundreds of new software programs for free

software.nasa.gov

116 pointstaubek14 comments

There are quite a few that are free for all, but most of them come with some restrictions. I tried to get a count of them[1] and got these numbers:

General Public Release - 132

U.S. Release Only - 210

U.S. Government Purpose Release - 139

U.S. and Foreign Release - 38

[1] These were counted by looking for strings in the PDF catalog. There are definitely some duplicates.

   wget https://software.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/NASA_Software_Catalog_2023-24.pdf
   gs -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o a.txt NASA_Software_Catalog_2023-24.pdf
   grep -F "General Public Release" a.txt | wc -l
   grep -F "U.S. Release Only" a.txt | wc -l
   grep -F "U.S. Government Purpose Release" a.txt | wc -l
   grep -F "U.S. and Foreign Release" a.txt | wc -l

Technically all of them come with restrictions, because if Nasa released them that software is still subject to the US's "we wrote this so we can sue you, not to actually prevent it" export bans on software to countries it doesn't like.

For example, none of these programs may be made available to Iranians, even if they were to aid somehow in fighting the Iranian government.

Yes, this is no-cost but not necessarily open source. NASA open source software can be found at: https://code.nasa.gov/

Does anyone have experience requesting software using the processes described on that page? I'd be really interested in learning from the software used to generate full-disk GeoColor imagery from GOES satellites as seen here [0] and described here [1]. Unfortunately that software is not yet released.

[0] https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-16&sec=ful...

[1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/documents/QuickGuide_C...

Found this one while browsing the catalog. Cool.

https://github.com/nasa/astrobee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk-1j3sXTqA

Three NASA Astrobee free-flying robots have been operating inside the International Space Station (ISS) since 2019. This astrobee repository contains source code for the Astrobee Robot Software, consisting of the flight software that runs onboard the Astrobee robots, a software simulator, and supporting tools, primarily written in C++.

So the first generation TARS

https://interstellarfilm.fandom.com/wiki/TARS

Clicked on a random one to be greeted by this message:

> This software is only available for use by federal employees and contractors to the federal government working on projects where this tool would be applicable.

Not exactly free for all

How is this even allowed? If my tax dollars go to a federal effort to develop software, if it isn’t classified and it is released how can they restrict me from using it legally? I partially funded it even if it was only one billionth of a penny.

There is something here that I cannot quite put my finger on. I am going to guess there is a lot of tiny little things - for example :

>>> This tool is a collection of macros that work with Microsoft Word to export Word comments into a pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet, which is used to disposition comments

Considering NASA also released was it openshift and a mission control suite this ranges from the sublime to ridiculous.

But it does suggest something valuable - putting your good ideas into a big pot of open source means more code reuse and much better focus on small problems that bother just your organisation

i think it's worth trying at work

OpenStack is what partly came out of NASA. OpenShift went through a few iterations starting with basically a Heroku competitor (Makara) that Red Hat bought and has been a Kubernetes-based container platform for a while now.

As I recall, there was some discussion around potential OpenStack confusion with the nomenclature but, originally, OpenShift was named around an automotive branding theme.

Hmmm, the "new" bit in the title seems to be over-selling things.

Taking a random example: https://software.nasa.gov/software/GSC-18031-1

It's description is: "Perl 6 DBPg PostgreSQL module"

Clicking the "Download Now" button instead re-directs to a GitHub repo: https://github.com/CurtTilmes/raku-dbpg

Last updated just over two years (!) ago.

I've tried and failed to find out what happened to Curt in the past. I suspect they died or were otherwise incapacitated 2 years ago because they suddenly stopped posting online.

Their GitHub profile page is showing activity in June and July (2023), so they're probably not dead. :)

There are some that are free to most people, but not all are.

The satellite industry very commonly uses NASA Debris Assessment Software to prove to the FCC that they won't create space debris.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com