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Budget Satellite
codejunkie writes: "Check out this story from the Baltimore Sun. Apparently
the middies were laughed at when they proposed a budget satellite for 50K. Boeing said it couldn't be done and gave them 250K. Well now they can build five more because the smart minds on the bay have built one."
OK, so you build one satallite for $50,000, that leaves you with $200,000.... how do you build five more $50,000 satallites with $200,000?
But will the quality be the same? Aren't the more expensive parts expensive just because they are designed for outer space use?
do they think it'll last???
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
Oh great, the Yugo of sattelites. Parts are gonna break off and land on my house, now that I've said something.
Don't you wish people would give you 5 times the amount you asked for when doing projects like this?
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
"And they were innovative - they discovered that the tape in a tape measure would flip into place on its own while in orbit."
We remember the last space venture battling metric versus auxiliary measurement systems.
(I'm sorry NASA. You guys do wonderful things. I just couldn't resist.)
jrbd
Does it have a big laser like the Death Star?
Crackpot trolls...not even trying.
The MacGyver satellite
If the project costs 45k to build, what is the launch cost??
Surely money would be better spent on making the system more reliable, than to waste it on an unsuccessful launch.
because unforseen expenses being factored in, you arent going to have the full 200,000 left
if you got some creative electrical engineers together and explained what you needed they could do it for under 10000 easy
give this job to caltech and see what they can do
for what its worth, we hate the term middies. mids or midshipmen is far more preferable.
Yeah, isn't it great to have a browser that actually listens to the "Content-type:" of the HTTP header?
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Anyone have any idea where the $25 panels can be purchased for $25 like the article says?
I want to build an array to power my house.... Or at least build an dc -> ac power outlet for my laptop in the desert... Anyone have any idea?
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Sometimes clicking on comments brings me back to the first page.
Sometimes it's nice to be on a Mac (vs. Windows). If someone pulls that stupid shit, just quit the browser. Closes all parent, child, etc. windows belonging to the application. Under Windows... close one browser, another pops up, close browser, another pops up, close, pop, close, pop. Greaaaaaat.
Several students at my school, Leland High, decided that we should undertake a challenge unlike any other. A goal was set to be the first high school to launch a satellite into outer space and have it communicate back with earth, as vaguely mentioned in a Slashback. This particular program is called Cubesat, but only consisted exclusively of universities and private corporations/citizens until we came along.
Much like the engineers in this article, we are using off-the-shelf parts to build our satellite, albeit not from Radio Shack since Radio Shacks don't seem to carry much in San Jose. The antenna we are designing exemplifies the simplicity of the components. In theory, guitar string or the wire used in braces would do the job easily. Our power system is even more simple: d-sized lithium batteries (non-rechargable) linked together.
The parts for our Cubesat will cost less than $5,000, more likely less than $1,000. We are hoping that our prototype will function properly during a test launch on an amateur rocket. After that, designing the antenna configuration (for those who are knowledgable about radio, our cube-shaped satellite forms a poor ground plane and we are also confined to a difficult broadcast frequency) and internal layout (to ensure that our satellite has a perfect center of gravity).
You can reach the webpage for the Leland Cubesat team here. Be forewarned, some of the information is slightly out of date at the moment. I will do my best to fix that as soon as possible, but priorities lie elsewhere at the moment.
but seriously, the whole thing is going to cost far more than $50k... I've read that it costs the Russians $10mil to send a rocket into space to the International Space Station. I'm just guessing, because I don't want to dig up the data right now. But I'm going to asume that this launch by NASA is going to be roughly the same amount of money, and it's definitely not less that $1mil.
So assuming a launch cost of anywhere from $1mil to $10mil, and considering there are 4 satelites going into orbit on the same flight, the price per satelite to launch is $250k to $2.5mil. And the final price for the satelite is $300k to $2.5mil.
Definitely not the $50k they're talking about. The ideea is still very interesting, and I hope it works out. But I just had to point out something that the article was obviously avoiding.
I seriously doubt the durability of this thing. A year is a nice goal, but it just doesn't seem possible. With temperatures varying several hundred degrees in orbit will some cheap solar panels designed for the desert really hold up for a year? I think not. I give these guys about 5 minutes in orbit before the thing literally melts into a pile of goo. Then the NASA boys can say, "I told you so," and then go bug congress for more money. "See! Look what happens when you do it cheap!?"
Also, it might be really interesting to see Radio Shack get excited about this. If by some engineering feat it does actually work Radio Shack could become 'cool' again. Who wouldn't want to build their own satellite for $50,000? Of course everyone will want one, and that might be a BAD thing. I understand that there is a lot of space in orbit, but I remember a show on the Discovery Channel describing how difficult it is getting for the space shuttle to navigate in orbit due to the ever increasing space junk up there. NORAD is supposed to track all of it - do you think they will be sending these guys a bill to track their $50,000 satellite if it goes whacko? I would. Do we really want a whole bunch of Radio Shack satellites orbiting the earth? When was the last time you purchased something really durable and interesting at Radio Shack?
I guess Slashcode 2.2 is a piece of feces? Well, just some parts of it...
Hello Patrick!
How come I can see the moon with my high-powered telecsope.. I can see the craters and stuff with infinite detail. How did they do that?
Cryptnotic
Motorola's Iridium debacle and Loral's Globalstar fiasco teaches us one thing about building and launching sats.
Hire some bright students and they'll figure out a way to get it done for a fraction of the cost.
Too bad they had to find out the hard way
For one, you really can't call that a discovery...
My main concern, though, is the reliability of the tape measure in question. I know I've had several tape measures that would never regain their rigidness once bent out of shape. This has happenes with even the reliable brands that don't typically have such problems.
While I appreciate the savings, I'm sure the public would be upset with NASA if they spent the millions to launch the satelite, and the entire satelite fails, simply due to a $5 tape-meausure component. Prices are important, but you must maintain a certain level of reliability that this project obviously isn't concerned with. It's fine for this instution as they could care less if NASA wastes money on their project (they have nothing to loose if it fails, and a lot of publicity to gain if it succeeds).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This is nothing new... There are or were about a dozen AMSATs now orbiting the earth. In fact, I think that back in the seventies the very first one used a silver plated tape measure as an antenna.....
Since Radio Shack's prices are so inflated, they could build the thing for $5000 if they got the parts wholesale or just shopped around a bit more.
now how long will this thing actually function on these radioshack parts.
Maybe if OSDN has the money, Slashdot could have it's own satellite in space. Now that would be something for nerds!
Yes, but, unless you are Slashdot personnel, or unless you post from the same IP and happen to have mod-points, there is no way you can read that stored IP address.
This I call progress. I am convinced that the next generation mainstream satelites will use tape measure antennas, not actual tape measures but especially crafted satelite antenna tape. It will sell for say 10x what these guys spent on theirs but it will still be cheaper than motorized deployment.
Now, if only we could slash launch cost by as much
a sig with any other name would be as witty
I remember seeing a schematic for an electronic circuit that explicitly specified a particular Radio Shack part for one of the semiconductor devices. The circuit would not work with commercial quality devices, only the Radio Shack part could be relied upon to have sufficient leakage current, which is normally a bad thing, for the circuit to work.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This kind of antenna was invented by "AMSAT" and successfully used on many of their satellites..
However, this kind of tape measure is only used for simple whip antennas or dipols for omnidirectional radiation...
You can't compare this with more complex antennas..
However, look on the AMSAT OSCAR-40 Satellite at www.amsat.org They have an antenna farm with many different antennas, dish, helix etc.. all homebrew for a fraction of a price of a commercial space proofen antenna - and it works!!!
By the way: AMSAT is an educational scientific organisation worldwide, which build almost 40 satellites in the last 30 years which only cost a fraction of commercial satellites..
Some of these satellites are still working even
after 10 years...
Hell, I wish them the best of luck. I hope the satellite lasts them 5 years instead of one. The idea here ISN'T making satellites out of cheap parts, its coming up with less expensive ways to accomplish the tasks needed to operate a saltellite. Sure using a tape measure for an antenna sounds hokey, but maybe it'll give the professionals some ideas for the future (gee antennas that unroll on their own instead of requriing some advanced deployment system that only gets used once) etc.
For as much as folks bitch about the gov't here, I think if a few students decide to show that a satellite CAN be constructed cheaply - more power to them. The information they gather will be very useful. Yes, sure, the launch costs aren't part of the $50K, but that wasn't part of the equation. Most satellites themselves WITHOUT launch costs are millions and millions of dollars. Nobody said they could launch it and build it for < $50K. So they hitch a ride on a rocket going up anyway. Remember, this thing is pretty small and it probably is tucked into the payload bay where a normal size satellite wouldn't fit.
But even if it isn't. I'd think geeks like us would be proud that some students got laughed at when applying for the grant and managed to pull it off through some everyday common sense and ingenuity. I say good luck and I hope everything works as planned!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
One of the greatest lies that historians have ever told is that software that we now refer to as gifts was kept free at the time of its discovery by Gates. This, as true history has shown, is sheer poppycock; it is a nefarious fantasy concocted in the minds of those who wish to control our collective destinies. Not only are there no contemporary documents that support the existence of this fantasy "free software", the people who are responsible for inventing it have never been particularly secretive about their true motives. It is interesting to note that in the late 1990s, no American (indeed, no person) had ever even heard of this so-called "Free Software Foundation." But then, in the 1980s, stories of them suddenly started appearing seemingly from nowhere. Your next-door neighbor started relating stories about "free software." Schoolchildren started to get educated about the different "tribes" and "groups" of these free software people, and yet not one parent demanded to see evidence of their existence. Our children were taught stories about how the great white pioneers of software supposedly plundered these peoples and took their software from them, and our children felt ashamed. Of course they felt ashamed! That's the whole reason this fantasy "FSF" exist! They were invented by radical leftist agitators at MIT in the early 1980s. The primary purpose that this mythical "FSF" serve is to instill false guilt in white people. They exist to make the Chosen People of this land feel badly about MS's software, and that is a thought crime. FSF is about (first and foremost) the hatred of money and love of goatse.cx. To that end, this nation's communists felt it necessary to invent an entire imaginary group that were "pillaged" by this continent's MS founders. The goal: to make this nation's guardians hate themselves and their software, and be sympathetic to that which is alien and unacceptable. The truth, of course, is that none of these stories has the least bit of credibility; despite repeated requests from the MS community, developers have been unable to produce a single piece of "free software." and profit. And so we must file this lie in the same trash dumpster as the (extremely overexaggerated) stories of so-called "UNIX" of the 1970s. Americans must constantly guard their computers from its enemies, and we must realize that more today than ever before, its enemies are more likely to attack from within.
I swear, most of you people are idiots. As soon as someone brings up such an interesting feat such as this one, people are quick to point at all the flaws. Well, I would like to see you idiots build a satellite for even triple the cost. Cripes, they do something great as an undergraduate project and all you idiots can see are the negatives. Morons.
My karma is -1 because I don't use AC posting. LOL.
Some of you people are insane. Your going off about how the sat will fail due to the fact that it dindt cost $100 million. I saw many people point to low cost failure's. Anyone care to link of the high cost one's?? What was that sat that was lost while landing on Mars? Anyone happen to have links to the ARRL's sat's that were put up in the 70's and 80's??? they were low cost and ran for . One had a salad bowl for a antenna, they didnt even BUY it.
Now let me show my insanity, If we had more creative people like this i'd bet you even money we could be on Mars, with a fuctioning colony before 2010. Anyone wanna ask Mr Bill if he would like is own planet? (BTW, any one happen to have the link to the space colonizing & mining laws?? I seam to have lost it)
Crackers`n`Soup
The article isn't clear about this, but this is a radio amateur satellite. Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, the creator of APRS, is the other professor involved.
btw, my great Uncle Spencer [who passed in '65, at 102] was an Indian fighter ... use to tell me stories that went along with his scars. He ****ing hated indians, worse than Democrats.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
No million dollars, the launch is free, piggybacked onto another satellite launch. Lots of opportunities for free launch like this exist, most satellites launch with concrete ballast to bring the payload up to a set weight, importantant for a predictible trajectory.
There is a site which stores all these and produces both single reports and summary pages. For example, here is the page for reports re-transmitted by the International Space Station:
http://www.ariss.net
(presently the amateur equipment abord ISS is turned off, so there is no data from the last few days).
When PCSat is operational, there will be a similar page available for the output from this satellite. I don't have the URL yet, but look at the main page for the database for it once it is available:
http://www.findu.com
Steve Dimse K4HG
ducktape. Yes folks, the only thing that will survive the nuclear war besides coakroaches. Personally, I don't think there has been a project yet, that could have not been improved or fixed by ducktape. No need for those fancy bolts, plates, etc. The 50k$ satellite will use ducktape.
--- d'oh
UoSAT-1, if I remember correctly (details are sparse on the net) was build on a budget of 60,000 as a student project and piggybacked into orbit on an Ariane-4 comsat launch. A number of subsequent UoSATs are part of the OSCAR series of radio amateur satellites, and a commercial spin-off of the University, SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Limited) build and sell minisats in the 200-500Kg rangefor commercial purchasers; see, for example, this report of the launch of UoSAT-12 (from 1999).
Lots of opportunities for free launch like this exist, most satellites launch with concrete ballast to bring the payload up to a set weight, importantant for a predictible trajectory.
How much concrete, there could be scope for quite a lot of "hitchhiking"...
Also is this regular concrete or a special (expensive) kind?
It has a light side, a dark side and holds the universe together.
Fixes bloody well everything!
most of the money in really expensive satellite goes into making it a system that provides a lot of backup options if something goes wrong. i.e. if it stops communicating with the earth, the satelline will try several things, like spinning itself round, etc. to reestablish communications. You can't provide this kind of systems on a budget satellite so if you loose it, that is nothing you can do but say: oh, i was budget. Secondly, a large fraction of the cost of real satellites goes into salaries of top engineers and into space electronics - a simple opamp costs ten times the one on the earth - just because you can be sure it is going to work.
Don't get me wrong, I truly belive this is a great idea and a lot of fresh ideas might come up, but people who build "proper" satellites are not wasting their money, it is a commercial enterprise after all...
just like the Mids themselves! Innovative, able to go on with next to no budget, fiercely determined ...
but I wonder if in the presence of more senior satellites (which is nearly all of them) it drops everything it is doing and stands rigidly vertical?
English -- gotta love it! / The engineers refuse to refuse the rocket until the refuse is removed from the launch pad.
If the satellite does fail, they have $200,000 to throw one heck of a party. But in the unlikey case the satellite works, they can make many more. According to the article the biggest cost was having outside sources test the equipment and ideas for spaceworthyness (new word).
Signed JerryMeander
"Slashdot, where its expected that you will make an uninformed response without actually reading the article"
If one could devise an inexpensive enough and small enough means to have servers in space and a good way to have them communicate with Earth clients (such as all those wireless networks people are starting), there could be another version of the Internet. My guess is that the smaller they were, the more you could have and the harder it'd be to put them out of commission. I'll leave it for people who know something about all this to work out the details, but I'm sure it's a possibility.
I was a bit confused when the article said it would relay messages between GPS users.. We all know GPS devices are receive-only. Anyone wanna summarize APRS in 1k or less?
Well, actually, they used a lot of accumulated knowledge in the small satellite arena. You see, a number of the Amateur Radio satellites (http://www.amsat.org) have used tape-measure antennas before. You cut 'em to length and secure them with nylon fishing line. Once exposed to vacuum, the fishing line sublimes and breaks, and the antenna elements unfurl. Simple and elegant.
For the nay-sayers here... and admittedly I may be late: I've only scrolled past a few comments and amstill looking... The little satellite communityhas a pretty grand tradition. It goes back to about 1969, if memory serves. Stanford University is big into it. Utah State University really preceeded Standfor in teaching courses assoicated with microsats... then Stanford hired Bob Twiggs away and got involved heavily. University of Surrey has a tremendous program. Ham radio groups are very active in all of these, and in other, non-univesity projects.
And, to touch on a few other points: Use of "Space-Qualified" components is not necessary. In some cases (radiation hardening) it's beneficial, especially for memory and processors, but simply using CMOS technology helps a great deal because of CMOS fab techniques in general. A big portion of "space-qualified" really means the ton of paperwork that accompanies the devices. "Industrial-qualified" are generally the same component minus the paperwork, with similar testing applied per batch/production run, and just as good.
COSMAC 1802 processors were the standard for years in little satellites. Harris Semiconductor has done some stellar work in producing Intel-type chips, in concert with Sandia National Labs, for radiation-intense environments. These are necessary for satellites, because of their predisposition to pass through high energy particle laden areas such as the Van Allen belts.
Another issue was taken with economies of scale. Building the first satellite in a microsat line is always the most expensive. You have to prototype, you have small-run costs associated with acquiring hardware. You're going to buy multiple pieces anyway: If you need 1, you buy 5 or 6 since you don't want to have to suffer the lead time if it breaks in the lab, so you get spares. If it doesn't break, you have fab parts for Version 2...
Oh, yes. The metric vs English system thingie... Most Ham Operators know how to calculate antenna lengths in both English and metric units. Sorry, I couldn't resist.
"Solarex is coming out with the new line of SX panels sometime in 2000 - We'll post all the new information as soon as it arrives."
120 watts - only $579 - hey, that will light a single 50 cent light bulb. Gee, for several thousand dollars I could run a toaster!
one'd hope 'they' (whoever they be) come up with some kind of self-combustible (no 02 needed, like TNT) cement someday--there's more junk in space than strewn over my backyard (anonymous cowards tend to have lots of junk in their backyards)
Why are they launching the rocket from the Kodiak islands?
Don't you need a more powerful rocket the farther away you get from the equator? I heard that was why the Russians built such powerful rockets because they launched them from Siberia.
Florida makes a lot more sense.
There is that one company the launch's rockets from a ship so that they can do it at the equator and avoid the here-today-gone-tomorrow governments that are on the equator.
Build a satellite for $50K, that is.
The article clearly stated that they ignored the cost of a significant amount of labor, as it was provided by individual grants.
Not to diminish the main point that there are sometimes unorthodox inexpensive solutions, it's hardly fair to use these cost comparisons to pick on aerospace firms who don't have labor forces that are willing to work for free.
Gives new meaning to "Geeks In Space". Where do I sign up for broadcast rights
It doesn't cost too much to get into space, if you've got something small. For cost a US "educational facility" $1500. under the Get Away Special (GAS-CAN) program. But that's not what those people are doing...
Instead, they are on the Athena 1 rocket... I used to work for Defense Systems (bought by CTA, bought by Orbital... you know the drill), and my satellite -- GemStar -- was the first to go on this model rocket. The price of the rocket was many times more than our vehicle, and we played the usual space chicken game (where they threaten to launch a slab of concrete and then when we're ready, all of the sudden they weren't really ready). Finally, launch day, and we're watching the video and it goes up and and up... and after about a minute it's going at an amazing speed, and then all of the sudden makes a 90 degree turn. The thing is going so fast that the thrust of the rocket doesn't even affect its direction. The range officer blew it up. Oh well. When I was with DSI we also made bouys -- the joke was that we should just upload the bouy software to the satellites because they always seem to end up in the ocean anyway.
The reason for the failure was that the guidance control loop had some undamped and unintended oscillations.. and there was only a limitied amount of hydrolic fluid on board to control the position of the thrusters. Once the fluid was expended (it was just squirted out after being used), there was no more directional control.
After our flight, they changed the name of the rocket from the LMLV-1 to the Athena to distance the second rocket from this first failure. Ironically, the second one failed too.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
windows has a task manager, machole
Where I worked we used a similar antenna-- A rolled up piece of regular measuring tape. Of course, the yellow looked funny, but we couldn't find a good supplier of raw material that didn't have some outrageous minimum buy. We also tried scrubbing off the paint, but found that once we got the smallest nick in the tape, it would soon fail there. So, AFAIK, we launched with the yellow tape. These were also handy for use in hinges -- once a panel opened, we wanted it to stay open, dammit, and the tape did that. But, you could do worse. One small satellite's primary antenna was made of copper tape, kapton tape (space-qualified packing tape), and bamboo.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Cripes people are brainwashed by their high school science teachers. What I want to know is: how is base 10 any less arbitrary than base 12? Sure you have to label your units so that I know you're talking about 12 inches->1 foot but feet loop around at 3, but "auxiliary measurement systems" teach kids alternate base systems and modular arithmetic at an earlier age than would be otherwise possible. Having both metric & english in your toolkit is desirable; adapt yourself to the job at hand instead of the other way around. If someone asked me to do anything for NASA, I'd do it in base negative ei if that was a requirement. Metric fetishists remind me of people who find patterns in pi and forget the decimal representation is purely arbitrary. Easy != superior.
We hate to cut your educations short, but you're needed in the DOD procurement office right now. Here are your comissions. Get to work!
I don't want some cheap ass satellites falling on my house because they were not built Ford Tough. How did they launch these satellites and why did NASA let them?
The millitary would benifit greatly from the advanced communication they could setup in the field using portable temporary satelites. You don't think they had an alterior motive, do you?
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
I hate to say this, but these midshipman have discovered nothing new. The Ham Radio operators have been doing this for years, with their Oscar satelites. They even used the tape measures for antennas. Tape measures also make it easy to set the antenna to the right length for the frequency they are using.
It's a good thing they're only expecting it to last a year. There are some pretty large problems associated with using Commerial Off The Shelf parts. Commercial ICs aren't hardened against radiation. They will fail much faster because they aren't designed to be bombarded by cosmic radiation. They're bringing standard laptops into space now, but they don't last too long before they fail.
I'm not an efficiency expert, but shouldn't the first satellite cost far more than its successors? R&D, and all that, doens't apply to duplicates, right?
--hongpong.com
They, and you deserve a golf clap for that one.
"Who needs a $50,000 antenna system when a metal tape measure might do the job? Solar panels costing $20,000 apiece? The students used the panels that power emergency phones in deserts and national parks. Cost: $25 each." There are reasons that these components cost so much. The antennas must be extremely well made and grounded or they'll be worthless with the background radiation. The clear plastic used to cover the solar tile in emergency phones would turn black in the radiation blocking the sun from the tile, and the cells would fail within a few hours in the heat and cold and radiation - these are not the same cells used in space by any measure. Their electronics, if I follow their 'budget cutting' methods of going to Radio Shack, would rip themselves apart from the thermal differences on different sides of the satellite, and would be fried from the radiation at the same time. The air pockets left between the solar panel's cover and its cells would pop in the heat, causing the cells to in turn shatter. I'd be very surprised if this satellite does more than orbit the earth the day after they launched it. Seems like a waste of $50k to me, even if it was a comparatively cheap $50k. I further find it insulting that these Naval students think they can do aerospace better than the smartest people at Boeing, who have been in the business for fifty years. It's like someone saying, "Bah! Open-heart surgery costs $150,000? All you need is a knife and a sewing needle. I'll go pick those up at the drug store and perform it myself!"
"Who needs a $50,000 antenna system when a metal tape measure might do the job? Solar panels costing $20,000 apiece? The students used the panels that power emergency phones in deserts and national parks. Cost: $25 each."
There are reasons that these components cost so much. The antennas must be extremely well made and grounded or they'll be worthless with the background radiation. The clear plastic used to cover the solar tile in emergency phones would turn black in the radiation blocking the sun from the tile, and the cells would fail within a few hours in the heat and cold and radiation - these are not the same cells used in space by any measure. Their electronics, if I follow their 'budget cutting' methods of going to Radio Shack, would rip themselves apart from the thermal differences on different sides of the satellite, and would be fried from the radiation at the same time. The air pockets left between the solar panel's cover and its cells would pop in the heat, causing the cells to in turn shatter. I'd be very surprised if this satellite does more than orbit the earth the day after they launched it. Seems like a waste of $50k to me, even if it was a comparatively cheap $50k.
I further find it insulting that these Naval students think they can do aerospace better than the smartest people at Boeing, who have been in the business for fifty years. It's like someone saying, "Bah! Open-heart surgery costs $150,000? All you need is a knife and a sewing needle. I'll go pick those up at the drug store and perform it myself!"
DECEMBER is coming soon enough.... ;-p
This is another view of the world.
This is neat and all, but I'd rather see NASA get the funding to maintain the soon to be ditched Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite that's been tracking the ozone hole for the last decade. Amateur sattelite projects are great, and I wish I could launch my own cheapsat, but we are losing the ability to do serious science of real importance because of a piddling (on a governmental scale) tens of millions a year!
That's a small price to pay, considering that in a couple of years, people 15 or 20 years your senior are going to have to refer to your green ass as "Sir."
When UoSAT started in 1985, the currency conversion rate between British Pounds and US Dollars was 1 USD to 3.25 GBP (Reached a high of 3.46 GBP, actually), according to OANDA. This means that this project really spent $195,000 USD.
First of all launches are really expensive and you pay per pound. So you much better off paying more for lighter equipment when you construct the satelite. You will probably save the money on the launch.
Also, as another poster noted, if your satelite doesnt work (like the air force one see article) you just waisted shitloads of money for the launch.
The launch is the expensive thing with satelites so bragging that u made the actual satelite cheaply is pointless if you dont consider the effect of the weight to be lifted and the reliability.
It's nice to see students getting a chance to do this. If the effective government monopoly on space launch could be pried loose the price might come down to where more colleges could afford this (as it is their getting a "free" launch).
Oh, and re:
"And they were innovative - they discovered that the tape in a tape measure would flip into place on its own while in orbit. A more expensive antenna system would have depended on electronics to do the same thing."
This must be the Microsoft definition of "innovative" -- the steel tape measure technique for satellite antennas has been around since the 1960's.
For that matter, motorized antennas are pretty cheap (think automobile scrap), just ridiculously heavy for that application.
-- Alastair
David Brown
USNA, Class of 1987
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Check out this text about the cooling experiment, referenced off the main PCsat page:
So we put 80 RED LEDS on the bottom of PC sat as a 3W thermal radiator for this test. And just for fun, at night we can also turn them on as
power permits as a visual experiment. Calculations suggest a magnitude of about 6 if it is pointing straight down. Eight, if it is off to one side or the other. Magnitude 8 is visible with binoculars.
So...
Which middie will be the first geek to cobble together a scrolling LED sign seen from space?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Tuned the telescope to the satellite and am currently hand tracking as I speak...
I...
C...
U...
P...
What the?!?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
To give a very rough idea of why Space stuff is both hard and expensive, here's a small article on what a satellite has to go through:
To give some idea of the environment a satellite has to work in, try this.
First, to simulate launch, attack a chain to your satellite-wannabe and drag it around behind your car on a rough road for 2 minutes at about 30 mph. It should be switched off throughout, then switched on immediately before the next bit.
Stick it in a tumble drier for a minute, to simulate the tumbling after separation. It should be able to right itself after you take it out if attitude control is important (like so you can point antennae towards earth....)
Stick it in the freezer, turned to max Cold. Then, while it's at -20F, take it out and stick it in an oven at about 250F. After a few cycles, half an hour of each, then put it in the microwave and set it on "high" for 10 minutes. Repeat continuously for the period it's supposed to operate, and it should work without a hitch throughout.
I can't think of an easy way to simulate vacuum (you get some interesting outgassing with many components, shorts, conductive glunk accumulating everywhere), but the above should be enough for a basic test. More complex and realistic ones are much tougher to pass.
(The above based upon personal observations at our clean room, and vibration, vacuum-and-heat torture chambers etc for FedSat-1, a Scientific research micro-satellite based on SIL components due to go up on a NASDA H-2A booster next year).
I'm just team-leading the software development BTW, I'm no hardware junkie. Programming for a 5-year life cycle where errant cosmic rays not just may but will randomly flip bits, and it's still gotta work, is non-trivial, but doable. Kinda neat and really interesting too.
In space, no-one can go up there to press CTRL-ALT-DEL.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
are beer
talk about profit margin!
"You like Chinese food." -Fortune Cookie
ask him to launch their satellite, it would be even cheaper!
--Manuel
"I hate quotations, tell me what you think"
Why are they launching disco balls into orbit? The Starshine site never really explains the purpose of the satellites clearly.