Welcome!

DISCLAIMER: we are new, and many things are still in discussion and development, so eventually some changes will happen.

This is the website for the Brazilian Student Society for Aerospace Research and Development.

We are engineering students and researchers from Brazil who believe in user freedom, open-source, and the maker culture. Here we want to contribute to aerospace-related projects, to develop better and democratic technology for the future.

Our Mission

Foster Free (Libre) and Open Source projects in the aerospace field, while creating a community of researchers, students, and anyone interested to contribute and share with those projects.

Indeed, we’re not limited to software projects, but anything related to aerospace engineering, for example, you can document the development of your CAD files for a drone, share it with the community, get feedback, contribute to others’ ideas, etc.

We also want to be a more maker community, so we encourage everyone to get hands-on, as we believe that prototyping and testing is the engineering way of going on. We currently don’t have an official physical place to prototype and make stuff, we depend on our universities and other institutions mostly free spaces, but who knows in the near/mid future?

You can check out our main ideas on our Creation Manifesto.

Teams

We have 6 teams that work on specific, but not exclusive, subjects, they are:

Air Team: airplanes, gliders, helicopters, multi-rotors (drones), and more.
Computation Team: avionics, analytics, UAV, computational tools, infrastructure, and more.
Power Team: motors, propellers, batteries, and more.
Rocket Team: rocket science and engineering projects.
Space Team: spaceplanes, space stations, satellites, and more.
Unusual Team: balloons, airships, bio, MAVs, and more.

About Open Source and Free Software

There are two visions (and definition) about free and open-source software.

One is about the freedom of the software, as quoted from the GNU Project website:

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

The other, more permissive vision, is about the pratical advantages of Open Source, as quoted from the Open Source Initiative website:

Open source enables a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is higher quality, better reliability, greater flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

We can accept both of the views. It’s more democratic, and sometimes excluding those who we don’t agree can be a poor choice, especially when the parts have the same positive goal.

I want to contribute!

Cool! As our projects are Open Source and Free (as in freedom), the contribution is the right spirit!

We use some tools to help out our community, Git is one of them. If you aren’t familiar with Git you should really check out about it here.

We use Trello to make our projects public, you can check it out here.

I want to contribute to a specific project

As you can download and fork any repository of any project, just do it!

If you want that your changes go to a bss-aero repository you can make a Pull Request (PR) and we will analyze what you have brought to the table (this isn’t a big deal).

If you are already a member and have the right team permissions you can develop with your team into the repository.

I want to start a new open-source project

Noice! We encourage this! If you need any help, you can get in touch with us. Starting a project can be a very personal thing in the beginning, so take your time to know what you want to achieve and what is the scope of your project.

If you already have a defined idea of your project and want to start it on bss-aero, we suggest checking out our Trello board.

Contact

We’re on GitHub as bss-aero, but you can get in touch with Victor Santos too.