The CubeSat project at Vermont State University (formerly Vermont Technical College) has ended. I am retired from teaching and am no longer mentoring students in this project. Furthermore, there are no other faculty at VTSU who are inclined to continue this work. Student interest in the project (with one exception) had been waning for some time anyway, accounting for the slow progress during the past few years.
At the time of this writing, the CubeSat Laboratory website is still up and running. However, the server is physically housed on the VTSU campus, and without anyone to manage it, the IT department will likely want it to be shut down after I am formally gone at the end of this year. I created a backup copy of the site off my personal website for safekeeping and to insure that the content will continue to be visible on the web for the foreseeable future. My backup copy of the site has already been updated, causing it to be slightly divergent from the original site, and it is now the best source of information about the project.
Similarly, the GitHub organization for the CubeSat Laboratory is frozen, probably indefinitely. I don't expect there will be any changes to the repositories in that organization unless and until another faculty member takes on the role I occupied. I am skeptical if that will ever happen. I decided to make copies of three repositories from the CubeSat Laboratory organization and import those copies into my personal GitHub space. In particular:
I chose not to fork these repositories, because it felt wrong to fork what are, in effect, dead projects. I don't anticipate that anyone will be accepting pull requests on the original repositories, or that there will be any further development on them that would need merging into my versions. In that respect, it is more straightforward, in my mind, to regard my development lines as entirely new and independent from the originals. I realize this sacrifices followers and watchers, and isolates existing forks from any further development activity. However, since I no longer have a professional relationship with Vermont State University, this seemed necessary. Hopefully those interested in CubedOS will find my repositories in due course.
However, this begs the question: do I expect to do any development in my repositories during my retirement? I don't know the answer to that at this time. I would like to. I was, and still am, excited about the possibilities of CubedOS, and I would like to see it reach a useful state. Although I don't expect to be organizing launches single-handedly, CubedOS has potential application as a general purpose embedded systems framework. It might be fun to work toward realizing that potential, even if only as a retirement project.
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