Opensource MicroGravity Laboratory

Low Cost Microgravity Research for Humanity

         The OMGL Community is an open source aerospace engineering initiative for the collaborative design of a balloon-lifted freefalling laboratory to create up to 90 sec of low cost high quality microgravity environment. Its design and its experimental results will be open and their utilization will be solely governed by the laws of open source engineering.

  The OMGL system consists of a freefalling rocket-propelled robotic laboratory, a high altitude scientific probe, and a launch and rescue ship. The laboratory is carried aloft by a stratospheric probe lifted by multiple superpressure, reusable helium balloons. It is released at an altitude between 6km and 50km over the ocean surface, according to its flight mode. Its hybrid rocket engine is able to compensate interactively an increasing air drag during descent.

• Subsonic Single Mode:    single interval of 32s of continuous freefall.

• Subsonic Multiple Mode: 4 intervals of 18s-24s of freefall in a single flight.
  

• Supersonic Mode:           single interval of 90s of continuous freefall.

    The first two freefall modes use a steam and water rocket propulsion system, where water expelled from a water tank by high pressure air is heated along all the airframe surface in cooling tubes, then released as steam. The third freefall mode reacts an alkali chemical with the steam in a combustion chamber under the nozzle to generate enough thrust to overcome the supersonic wave drag.

   Once the microgravity freefalling phase is over, a succession of landing parachutes are deployed to decelerate the laboratory. Near the surface of the ocean, 4 inflatable floaters are inflated by the laboratory for a soft sea splashing. After splashing, the laboratory sends its GPS position to the ship via a satellite text message, and it's able to wait for the ship safely in any oceanic water for many hours, even days if necessary.

Open Source Development

               The OMGL system is to be developed by an online community of volunteer organizations, educational institutes, and core individuals based on its current/future design. This will require a worldwide collaboration of scientists, universities and other scientific institutions, using their own laboratories and test facilities to minimize the development costs. In return, volunteers will be able to conduct their own experiments using the community owned laboratories, in all pure and applied science areas with the following limitations: no research can be made for military applications and ALL results must be publicly available.

        The ideal application of the laboratory is fundamental physics and experiments for a unified Theory of Everything (ToE). Fundamental biology research could also benefit from the laboratory and we hope that it can be used to advance research in tropical diseases. Of course, the laboratory cannot host live animals but any in vitro experimentation can be easily flown. Fundamental chemistry and nanotechnologies could also be reasonable applications.

       Given the free nature of the collaboration, becoming a volunteer does not imply a formal obligation of the institution or individual with the community. Volunteers have to cover only their own expenses both in the development phase and in the utilization/management phase (costs of using their own laboratories and facilities and any required materials for their experiments). Collaboration between volunteers is highly encouraged.

      During and after the development of the OMGL, developers will have the right to use the OMGL system. The final system will be the property of the community and its usage will be shared among the volunteers according to the amount of their contributions over the years, with early contributions carrying more weight, especially the initial efforts for building the system.

      Universities or peaceful research organizations, who are not part of the OMGL community, will be free to build their own version of the system, with the specific condition that any changes to the original design must be made available as opensource for all to use. This is necessary for security reasons.

      Commercial providers will be allowed build the OMGL too and sell flights to users which are unable to build their own OMGL system. Commercial providers will have to follow the same opensource design condition, and they will have to grant 10 free flights for every 100 commercial flights, to be used by unprivileged educational institutions around the world who cannot afford even commercial flights.

Scientific Utilization

    The laboratory has been designed for integrating experimental payloads requiring:

•  volume and mass greater then a drop tower's capsule maximum limits
  
•  microgravity intervals longer then those offered by parabolic flights
  
•  extremely low vibration levels
•  lower cost per launch then sub-orbital rockets
  

    These can be the requirements of many experiments in fundamental physics. The goal of Nanogravity Labs, who invented the OMGL, has always been to create instruments and new technologies allowing fundamental physics experiments leading hopefully to the long awaited Theory of Everything (ToE), the theoretical unification of all known physics. For more information see this Wikipedia article about it.

      The large payload capacity can also allow multiple in vitro biological and medical research units sharing a single flight. Our hope is that it can be used for low cost experiments in fundamental biology. Anyway, the laboratory is not designed to host live animals and plants.
       
     Other applications could be research in fundamental chemistry, nanotechnologies and molecular engineering.