curious inquiry

[marco]

Hi,

I am an avid tinkerer with your program for years now. I am eternally grateful for your time in making this program free for me to use.

I understand that the rule in USA is that taxpayers money goes toward funding for stuff that  must be made publicly available. (I so like that as a general rule for life on this planet!) Is that where the money comes from to fund the development for both -aero and open- ?

Am I correct in thinking that VSPaero development is separate from the making of OpenVSP? Or do you guys talk to each other?

thanks,

yours sincerely,

marco vanderBijl

[Rob McDonald]

Unfortunately, there is no rule in the USA that what taxpayer funds go to must be made public -- there is lots of high quality work that is done that is not available to everyone.

The history of OpenVSP (and VSP and RAM before it) development (including funding history) is laid out in detail in the 2022 overview paper available here.

Short version:  Initially, development of RAM was a side project by J.R. when he was at NASA Ames.  Eventually, J.R. left NASA, but later was still occasionally funded as a contractor.  Later, development moved to Langley and the name was changed to VSP.  Sporadic development continued, but it was never a 'primary effort' or a recognized long-term research project at NASA.  Starting in 2006, funding shifted from occasional subcontracts to J.R. to competitive awards in response to research solicitations (NASA STTR, NASA NRA x2, USAF SBIR, NASA SBIR, etc.).  J.R.'s involvement lasted until about 2015.  I was involved earlier, but I started coding in OpenVSP proper in 2012.  There have been numerous other contributors through the years.  In 2018, I went to work for Uber on Elevate -- my team and I continued some development there.  When Elevate was sold to Joby in 2021, I became a freelance contractor.  My development efforts are currently supported by NASA, the US Air Force, and the US Navy.

So, the vast majority of work on OpenVSP over the years has been funded by the US Federal Government.  Some in response to research solicitations, other in more of a task-list type approach.  Quite a few students were paid to work on OpenVSP as either summer employment or in support of their MS Thesis work while I was a professor.

In addition, some work has been funded by private companies (Uber and also some innovative startups who use OpenVSP and needed certain features and/or tweaks).

Furthermore, I am generally not just working on whatever random thing comes to mind.  I am usually working to address problems users are facing, or to advance capabilities in directions that users want to go.  Development follows the dollars.

Essentially none of the development has been done for free or on a volunteer basis by me or the other main developers.  There have been occasional contributions from the community, but those have generally been small, minor, and infrequent.  I would welcome more contributions, but I understand that it is a large and complex code base that is daunting to get into.  However, I frequently observe graduate students going to elaborate lengths to do something with OpenVSP that would be much easier if they would just modify the code directly -- something along the lines of "days developing in Python can save you minutes in C++".

The exception would be maintenance of the OpenVSP Hangar.  The Hangar was developed in 2012 by Alex while he was a student of mine.  He has long since graduated and is doing great in his career.  Unfortunately, our web hosting provider sees fit to occasionally update the operating system and other software that openvsp.org runs on.  Sometimes, these updates cause the hangar to break.  When that happens, Alex is the only one who has any clue how any of that works -- and even he hasn't thought about it for a decade.  Unfortunately, I don't have a way to pay Alex to maintain the Hangar and website code at this time -- so we are forced to rely on his generous volunteer time to fix things any time something breaks.


VSPAERO is developed by Dave Kinney.  He is a full-time employee at NASA Ames.  For the past year or so, there have been some other NASA contractors who have been contributing to VSPAERO.  In particular, pushing the development of the adjoint version for optimization and for coupling to structural analysis.

Dave Kinney is also the primary developer of CBAero, an engineering tool for hypersonic aerodynamics.  So sometimes VSPAERO gets a bunch of his attention -- but sometimes he spends six months working on doing entry and re-entry modeling for the Mars Sample Return mission.

Initially, VSPAERO was very much something he squeezed in around the edges, but as its capabilities have grown, it has become more important users -- and thereby more of Dave's time has been able to go to VSPAERO development.

I will occasionally fix a trivial error in VSPAERO -- usually something that a Windows or Mac compiler picks up that Dave's compiler (Linux) missed.  But I am not a VSPAERO developer.  I am not familiar enough with the code to make any substantial changes.

Dave and I are in frequent contact.  We work together to make sure that OpenVSP's GUI will support new VSPAERO features as they are added.  In addition, many of the longer-term changes to VSPAERO require coordination from the OpenVSP side.  For example, we've been working on changes to the main file format and mesh topology for communication between OpenVSP and VSPAERO.  He can't develop the feature until OpenVSP can provide the geometry and give him a file to work from.

Rob

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[marco]

Hello Rob.

Thanks for the information. The 2022overview paper was also interesting to go through.

It's nice to know some names of those behind the scenes. Thank you all.

"Unfortunately, there is no rule in the USA that what taxpayer funds go to must be made public -- there is lots of high quality work that is done that is not available to everyone." --

hmmm, I must research were I got that notion from then. I do think that the rule should be included in the NewWorldOrder Constitution :-)

marco

[marco]

oh indeed!.

just tested (i never made use of the hangar). and it currently shows an error message.

"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."

[marco]

was just thinking more about this issue. is there a way to reverse .vps files into angel or python script? Then you could push the hangar files into github aswell?

[Rob McDonald]

There is no way to 'reverse' the files.   However, *.vsp3 files can be managed effectively in GitHub as-is.  They are just plain text XML files.  Many OpenVSP users track their *.vsp3 files in git.

Rob