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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."
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...
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
"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
Obviously, they are using goverment math...
:)
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Well, they did say much of the expenses came from paying facilities to test their bargain-basement ideas. So you would assume that subsequent stages wouldn't require quite so much testing, unless they're making radical changes.
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.
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.
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
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.
Oh u don't have to give the kickbacks for all of them.
Cost of satallite=$40,000 *(6)
Kickback to politicians=10,000
Total = $250,000!
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?
Hello Patrick!
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
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
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 < $50K. So they hitch a ride on a rocket going up anyway. Remember, this thing is pretty small and it probably is tucked into the payload bay where a normal size satellite wouldn't fit.
But even if it isn't. I'd think geeks like us would be proud that some students got laughed at when applying for the grant and managed to pull it off through some everyday common sense and ingenuity. I say good luck and I hope everything works as planned!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Someone ought to be ashamed they modded you up to informative. You've just about doubled the cost per kilo for a shuttle luanch (probably the most expensive means of getting into orbit you can find). My Powerbook only weighs 5.9 pounds with a Lithium ion battery, CD-ROM, and hard disk drive in it no to mention a 14.1 inch LCD screen. Ergo about a pound of electronics can do a whole bunch. Antennas can be very lightweight (a dipole with a mesh reflector works very well) and a 1.375"x4.5" flexible solar panel that outputs 50mA at 3VDC (think an array of these) will set you back 8$ a pop from RS. Nine pounds of satellite can do a suprising amount. Besides the fact your launch figures are pretty high, on a Delta II you can put stuff into orbit for about 6300$ per pound, a Soyuz can put you into an LEO for a third of that even.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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 $100 million. I saw many people point to low cost failure's. Anyone care to link of the high cost one's?? What was that sat that was lost while landing on Mars? Anyone happen to have links to the ARRL's sat's that were put up in the 70's and 80's??? they were low cost and ran for . One had a salad bowl for a antenna, they didnt even BUY it.
Now let me show my insanity, If we had more creative people like this i'd bet you even money we could be on Mars, with a fuctioning colony before 2010. Anyone wanna ask Mr Bill if he would like is own planet? (BTW, any one happen to have the link to the space colonizing & mining laws?? I seam to have lost it)
Crackers`n`Soup
btw, my great Uncle Spencer [who passed in '65, at 102] was an Indian fighter ... use to tell me stories that went along with his scars. He ****ing hated indians, worse than Democrats.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
There is a site which stores all these and produces both single reports and summary pages. For example, here is the page for reports re-transmitted by the International Space Station:
http://www.ariss.net
(presently the amateur equipment abord ISS is turned off, so there is no data from the last few days).
When PCSat is operational, there will be a similar page available for the output from this satellite. I don't have the URL yet, but look at the main page for the database for it once it is available:
http://www.findu.com
Steve Dimse K4HG
ducktape. Yes folks, the only thing that will survive the nuclear war besides coakroaches. Personally, I don't think there has been a project yet, that could have not been improved or fixed by ducktape. No need for those fancy bolts, plates, etc. The 50k$ satellite will use ducktape.
--- d'oh
You haven't heard of Moore's law? Of course, not everything is chips, but prices do tend to fall and/or some components get replaced with cheaper alternatives.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Exactly how much does a useful satellite weigh?? I've heard rumors of weight affecting usefulness when talking about steaks, but not satellites. Re-tooling logic, I'm guessing my palm is worthless but I'm personally an invaluable replacement to mankind!! :)
Phoenix
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).
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?
The first one was a prototype, maybe it cost then $10,000 working out how to put it together right. So the next lot would only cost around $40,000.
The point is that Boeing thought that $250,000 was a minimal kind of figure.
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!
Launching a satellite costs something like $50,000 per kilogram. So as long as their satellite weighs less than 4 kilograms, they'll use the whole $250,000 to put the thing into space.
Launch vehicles frequently contain "ballast". The reasoning being that it is easier to make payload mass up to a known value than throttling the engines. Which would require more complex (and expensive) engines and flight control systems.
The only difficulty is if the "hitchhiking" satellite has a much lower density than ballast materials. Since either it wouldn't fit or the rest of the ballast needs to be something extra dense. Since typically concrete is used density can be adjusted by proportion/type of agregate.
Antennas can be very lightweight (a dipole with a mesh reflector works very well) and a 1.375"x4.5" flexible solar panel that outputs 50mA at 3VDC (think an array of these) will set you back 8$ a pop from RS
Depends how much power you need. If you need large solar arrays then a mechanism to unfold them could be the expensive bit as well as batteries.
Also I wasn't aware that RS sold pnmantic parts or does this satellite have no kind of attitude control...
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...
Wouldn't it be very difficult to keep the panels oriented to towards the sun? Just an amature project after all.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
i wouldn't want the "Chosen People", aka the Lost Tribe of Redmond, to feel undermined and disallusioned about it.
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 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.
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?
You don't. The article says: "Boeing was so skeptical, the company gave the academy $250,000, which Boden and Smith now plan to spread out over five years to give new students a chance to build a satellite each year."
Five years, one satellite each year. Makes five satellites. Slashdot editors just use different mathematics.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
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
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
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.
Terrestrial APRS uses (usually) ham radio frequencies to pass around GPS position reports along with additional data, like the identity of the sender (their Amateur Radio call sign). There are a couple of Web sites that will show you real-time maps of the current position reports. The main Web site is http://www.aprs.org.
73
Indeed. Unless NASA decides to be nice, they'll be paying the standard $11,000 per pound. The solar tile alone will cost them $30,000 -- more than half their budget.
/me thinks "Why didn't they just use batteries?"
One of the early Amateur Radio (ham) satellites (and maybe a ton of others, for all I know) used a copper rod along the "vertical" axis (points toward center of earth) to align their sat with the earth's magnetic field, so they didn't need any active stabilization during the parts of the orbit they needed to communicate with the sat.
73
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!
Well I was thinking that too, but then I though perhaps Boeing gave them the $250,000 *after* the prototype was built.
But hey, what's 5 or 6 if Boeing only said you could make make one out of $250,000.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
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
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.