Very, very cool......

Great Post!!!

NeverGore

We should put these guys in charge of NASA, who have shown themselves incapable of doing anything but launching less and less for more and more $$.

Freepers could get together $50,000. That would be $2/freeper and then we could build and launch:

EARTH STATION - FREEP-1

Hey BS (Baltimore Sun) Does this satellite have a name? A number?

If you care to take a look at this great project please see the PCsat, A Naval Academy Amateur Radio Satellite page.

So can I expect Radio Shack to be putting out a kit for this soon?
;)
KH7ZD

BTT

We should put these guys in charge of NASA......

I Agree
LOL

This is the creative energy and talent we need to support and continue to inspire!

Congratulations group!

Thanks for the post, I was wondering how this project was going.

Sounds like the old Soviet space program that, cost wise, had a shoe-string budget compared to NASA. They grabbed lots of off-the-shelf hardware cuz they didn't have the money to engineer and build ultra-high precision parts.

The bottom line is that maybe NASA over-engineers things, not for reliability, but because that is how it was always done historically.

I'd rather see tax dollars spent to make 10 satellites that cost $50K, even if half fail to operate, than waste $5 million on just one satellite engineered for a high probability of success. Especially if both the "cheap" and the "expensive" satellites perform the same task.

Bump for science, amateurs, and America.

Then if they can develop some inexpensive delivery vehicles the guys at NASA will have to find productive work somewhere else.

NASA is a research arm of the government. We develop technologies for missions that can then be transferred over to the commercial side to promote commerce. We stopped doing 'ping-me' satellites in probably the 70's. We've been doing more sophisticated stuff, deep space, earth science research, with more and more complex instrumentation. Much of the earth science stuff will transfer eventually to NOAA who does weather stuff. The communications capabilities that we have in space assets is to support manned and unmanned missions with very high bandwidth.

Not that I speak for NASA, it's just the way I see it. And I do applaud anyone who can build a satellite for cheap that does anything. It's a fun thing to be working on.

DC

Heathkit, maybe??

Speaking of inexpensive delivery vehicles:

There is active interest in using maglev systems to build "sleds" that could provide initial acceleration for conventional spacecraft, possibly driving them up the side of a tall mountain. Maglev systems have been much more thoroughly investigated than railguns and coilguns, and in the space launch applications envisioned the final sled velocity would be only hundreds of kilometers per hour, and the power requirements would be manageable.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center has already built two small proof-of-concept tracks, and hopes to build a larger track to fly small models. They feel that a maglev sled could be used to accelerate a reusable launch vehicle (RLV) to up to 970 KPH (600 MPH), using only about $75 USD worth of electricity and reducing the size of the RLV by 20%. The RLV would begin takeoff about halfway down the track, and the sled would be braked magnetically, allowing some of the power to be recovered, or to allow a clean recovery of the RLV in case of launch failure.

From here.

I'd rather see tax dollars spent to make 10 satellites that cost $50K, even if half fail to operate, than waste $5 million on just one satellite engineered for a high probability of success. Especially if both the "cheap" and the "expensive" satellites perform the same task.

Ha-ha! You made me spit out my coffee! Guess how much it cost for the NRO's KH-11 satellite launched last month for Afghanistan support? No, wait, just guess how many digits.

Cool space bump!

Thought you'd get a kick outta this one...