Artist makes satellite at home in just $500
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/Artist-makes-satellite-at-home-in-just-500/articleshow/15162830.cms
This is the second time an article has got me thinking about the idea of micro satellites. Ten thousand dollars a pound sounds prohibitively expensive unless you can engineer ways to keep the overall weight down. Higher orbit is expensive, but once out of the bulk of the atmosphere and in an orbit there are several relatively low cost methods of increasing your orbital height. I am a huge fan of the idea of inflatables and have given a lot of thought over the years (decades, really; I started to get into space before I became a teenager) to how I would design something. This article makes me think that it might be a hobby worth pursuing (an expensive hobby, to be sure, unless it becomes practical to piggy back off of other projects (according to my calculations, the guy in this article had to pay over $100K to get his $500 satellite into orbit, or $48,000 per pound)). I have a couple of ideas for rocket design I would like to try, but haven’t pursued any of them because they are quite unlikely to provide any meaningful income for a decade or longer even if they work. I had hoped to pursue this sort of activity after becoming wealthy, but that looks increasingly unlikely as I get older (I still claw on to some fantasies, but it gets harder and harder to maintain a grip after all this time), so articles like this make me think that it might be worth exploring doing it now (or rather in a few years after our current expensive hobby project (greenhouse/pool) is paid for). There is that web site for getting donations to do projects (kickstarter.com) that might be interesting to explore for funding. I have thought off and on about projects to add to that site but nothing has grabbed me enough to want to invest the effort. There are space related projects already on the site and a few seem to have been successful, so there does appear to be some potential.
