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GMAT (General Mission Analysis Tool) is an amazing open-source tool for designing spacecraft orbits etc.

The latest documentation for GMAT version 2020a says that help is available at http://forums.gmatcentral.org, but that site is unresponsive (ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED ), and hasn't been updated at the Internet Archive since GMAT Forums as of 2019-06-13

Has it moved? Was there any announcement? Is there a more functional, searchable archive somewhere, or the raw data that someone could use to put up at least a static copy?

Is there an alternative forum to recommend? Or is this space.stackexchange.com site the best we've got?

And what is the status of the GMAT project itself?

Update: another thing that we would love access to is the Mission Library, which was at http://li394-117.members.linode.com:8090/MissionLibrary but that fails with "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" and doesn't seem to have been captured by the Internet Archive at all. It would be very very helpful to have good examples of current and/or complex missions to build on.

And one more old forum is also missing (redirecting to another site:) gmat.ed-pages.com/forum

Does anyone active have edit permissions on the GMAT Wiki to point to the new locations identified in the answer[s]?

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    $\begingroup$ The GMAT email help lists are also dead. They get a question from a new user every few months, which are met either with silence or someone advising them to seek help elsewhere. I'd like to be able to use GMAT, but I have yet to succeed with it. :( $\endgroup$
    – Ryan C
    Commented Dec 31, 2021 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ Interesting, @RyanC. Can you point to the email help lists? Is there an archive? $\endgroup$
    – nealmcb
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 4:21

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Yes, there is an alternative forum. Try https://gmat.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/GW/overview . I just found this link today, by a contorted path through the help files of multiple obsolete versions at apparently abandoned web sites. It turns out there was an announcement of this change, but it was so subtle that I missed it.

Unfortunately, the "For Contributors" page, last updated in January 2020, includes those same dead links to forums and Mission Library. There is also a functioning link to a developer blog, but that site hasn't been updated since 2012! However, I did find archives of the email lists, which go back to 2007 and are up to date, at least after accounting for the fact that there simply haven't been any posts since October on any list except the automated build/test system notifications.

In the new atlassian wiki site, if you drill down the nav bar at left through Pages -> For Users -> More Resources -> Contacts, it will offer you subscription links to six different mailing lists. The two I've been on are gmat-users and gmat-developers . Those pages have a big blue button toward the bottom to subscribe, but a few lines below it is a link to browse and search the archives at sourceforge.net, which sadly displays just how little those lists have ever been used. Things are getting slightly better, but still darn near silent, since gmat-users had only 2 messages in 2018 and 2 messages in 2019, but went up to 15 messages in 2020 and 15 messages in 2021.

One of those messages from 2020, the only one in the month of August, was the official release announcement for a new version of GMAT. It ended with the usual boilerplate "For further information, please visit our wiki", but I didn't notice at the time that the URL listed for that wiki was a different site than it had been in the previous official release announcement, back in May of 2018.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for a number of very helpful updates! Any word on archives of the old forum? Or ofgmat.ed-pages.com/forum? Were they actually the same per chance? $\endgroup$
    – nealmcb
    Commented Jan 5, 2022 at 1:13
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    $\begingroup$ I did recent update to GMAT 2020a. I see the most gmat queries in this forum. There was an attempt to move them out but I think there was no other forum found to move them to. I was very interested in the search by Ryan. I've been tinkering with GMAT since it's beginning and did attend several webcasts that don't seem to occur anymore. I suspect it is nasa cost control that has reduced public visibility of gmat but as far as I can see it's use in nasa has not diminished. I've wanted to find a GMAT script of complete voyageur missions. Any known sources? $\endgroup$
    – tckosvic
    Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 21:01
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you @Ryan C! To the best of your knowledge, has the situation changed? I just subscribed to gmat-users and gmat-developers. I seek some help getting started with the Java API interface of GMAT. Are you aware of any sample project? API User Guide has quite a few Python and MATLAB samples, but it's quite thin on Java. Thanks in advance! $\endgroup$
    – Manny
    Commented Mar 26 at 2:01
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    $\begingroup$ @Manny gmat-users has been more active lately than ever before, with 4 to 10 messages per month over the last six months rather than only one or zero per month in the previous year. There have even been some people from NASA who actually replied to questions with helpful answers! $\endgroup$
    – Ryan C
    Commented Mar 29 at 16:07

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