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USNA "Budget" Satellite Launched and Functioning

Posted by timothy on from the hey-bob-where's-my-metal-tape-measure dept.

Arpad Korossy writes: "Hey, you ran a story on this earlier, and some people expressed doubt whether a sattelite made for a tenth of the usual cost using mostly components from Radio Shack would work; well, it has. The best line in the whole article has to be 'Instead of a $50,000 antenna system, the group used a metal tape measure.""

2 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Innovative=expensive by tony_gardner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd like to point out to all thos who think that NASA overspends its budget the vast cost difference between developing something new, and buying a consumer product. The rocket engine which cost 20 billion for the first one is available "off the shelf" for 200,000 today. Same for "space rated" electronics, valves, cameras, etc. It's perfectly feasable to get a reliable payload working today for very little. It probably won't, however, do anything very innovative, because doing innovative requires high precision equipment which costs a lot on earth. The equipment also has to survive the takeoff, which is another matter.

  2. Interesting development, but not revolutionary by f00zbll · · Score: 5, Interesting
    First off I am pretty impressed such a cheap satellite is able to stay up for a month. Although it shows it is possible to build a functional satellite from off-the-shelf parts, it isn't going to revolutionize the space industry. More likely than not, it will drastically change how schools teach engineering, physics and astronomy. As others have mentioned, big expensive satellites are engineered to a different reliability standard. If our national telecommunications infrastructure was built with a bunch of small cheap satellites, I doubt our phones and television would be as reliable.

    Where all this really matters is with the next generation of engineers, scientists and inventors entering college in the next few years. They are the ones that will benefit from this type of experimentation. Not only will students be able to get valuable hands on experience about real world engineering, but they will get others interested in the field. Developments like these bring exotic technologies down to earth and show students they can do something really challenging. With so many posts on /. about burning out, boring classes, and disillusionment, this may bring in a breath of fresh air.

    The down side of having a lot of students launching small satellites is it polutes space and makes the job of tracking dangerous objects more difficult for NASA. All of these developments aren't free, because there are a lot of other financial, political and environmental concerns attached to satellites.