Satellites on the Cheap

An anonymous reader writes "At a cost of just $50,000 - including plane tickets to the Alaska launch site - it was constructed using off-the-shelf parts not designed to withstand the rigors of space. Its life span was only expected to be a few months. Six students put together the satellite last year after a three-year research and design project made possible with a grant from Boeing Co. The Department of Defense (news - web sites) Space Test Program approved the project and put it on a launch list"" Beats doing the egg drop.

Comments

The $50,000 is a misnomer

[PoiBoy]

This $50,000 price tag was just for the parts to actually build the satellite. It does not include the value of the grant from Boeing for three years of development time, nor does it reflect the salaries of engineers to do it. Moreover, the article did not give details about how the satellite was in orbit; and I would bet that if a person wanted to shoot his own satellite into space, the price would be prohibitive.

Sure, a bunch of amateurs being able to develop a satellite on a shoestring budget makes for an interesting story, but to suggest that there will soon be a supply of reliable, ultra-cheap satellites is a stretch.

Re:The $50,000 is a misnomer

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually they went to Boeing, and said- hey we need $50,000; Boeing looked at the plan, it looked good, so they patted them on the head, and gave them $250,000, figuring they would need it- and then the students came in on their original budget...

So, the university now has funding for the next 4 years.

There were no salaries- this satellite was built using student labour.

The satellite was launched for free of course, there was space on one of the launchers for it, and they weren't charged AFAIK.

Incidentally, radio hams have put their own satellite up... so its not totally out of the question for privately funded groups.

Re:The $50,000 is a misnomer

[DocDavid]

Incidentallly hams have put up over 30 satellites over the years. Most of them have been launched vy AMSAT, a privately funded organization of hams that work to put up satellites for the ham radio community. Also most of the newer satellite technology has come from the success and failures of hams.

Dave
KA3TNY

Off topic, but started on topic.

[DoorFrame]

I went to look up a few older stories on slashdot which, as I recalled, were the same story as this one. But I recall reading the other one's months ago. I was curious if this was merely a repeat so I scrolled to the bottom of the Slashdot main page and used the SEARCH option.

Great, I thought, I'll just search for +Boeing +Student +Satelite or something of that sort.

I tried this.

And I was once again reminded, when I reviewed the results, that Slashdot, for some reason, doesn't have boolean searches. Now, for a site which champions Google "the home of the AND search" .com, I'm confused as to why this functionality would not have been added to slashdot by now. It makes it next to impossible to find older stories, because instead of stories about Boeing AND students AND satelites, I find stories about Boring OR students OR satelites.

This, as you can imagine, is not terribly helpful. It turns out that there are an awful lot of stories about Boeing or students or satlelites.

So, to recap, I'm pretty sure this story is a repeat (I'm sure someone else will go to the trouble of posting the exact references), but I'm damned positive that the Slashdot/Slash search feature is only marginally useful at its best, and outright useless at its worse.

Begin the down-modding if you must.

Re:Off topic, but started on topic.

[br0ck]

I would also like to see more advanced search options, but in this case if you spell satellite correctly you'll find exactly what you wanted on the first two pages of results. Using your search terms, the Slashdot search results are actually more relavant than the Google AND search results.

Re:Light on info

[InitZero]

Neither this article, nor the previous one posted on /. mention what the USNA plans to do with the satellite.

Ham radio operators all over the world (please view with Netscape; it doesn't load right with IE) use a nifty packet application, APRS through PCSat.

APRS is short for Automatic Position Reporting System. Basically, the satellite allows hams to send GPS reports (such as mine), short text messages, weather reports, etc. to a large number of users. The satellite acts as a 'digital repeater'. Any packet it hears, it send back to earth.

To hit the satellite, all you need is a hand held radio running less than five watts of power into the stock 'rubber duck' antenna. If you're a boater, hiker or whatnot that isn't in range of land communications, you can easily send your data through the satellite and have it relayed to a huge earthly footprint.

Over much of the populated world, there are land based digital repeaters that will relay these packets for hams. Many even gate the information to the internet where it can be viewed by anyone.

If you're the least bit technically and electronically minded, you can probably get the base level ham license (Technician) without any difficulty. It doesn't require a knowledge of Morse Code (CW) anymore. You can take the sample Tech test online. The sample test uses real questions right off the FCC exam. The test costs under $10 in most areas.

Using more than a dozen ham radio satellites for free isn't the only reason to get your ham license, of course. There's also that you can modify those 2.4 gHz network cards to run up to 1,500 watts of power legally instead of under half a watt as sold. Think what kind of distance you could extend your network! (And how many birds flying nearby will be microwaved!)

If nothing else, a ham radio license will get you another punch in your 'biggest geek' card. Who doesn't want that?

Matt (k4mls)

Sheesh...another repeat of OLD news

[HardCase]

Zowie, we read about this last November!

Oh, and how about in August?

Kudos to them!

[Merconium]

I think this is a great story, for two reasons: 1) many of my 8th graders are actually doing an egg drop next week, so it's funny to see that others think it is as lame as I do (although they have to drop two eggs that touch, so that is much more of a challenge), and 2) some of my students are trying to get money from Intel to build a small solar car, so I understand how difficult it is to actually go through with something like this.

The reality remains, however, that I don't see Ball Aerospace suddenly dumping their expensive test facilities.

One wonderful thing about Ball is that they do work very closely with the University of Colorado and NASA to support student designed sats. They aren't, however, cheap.

No risk to GEOsats

[isdnip]

There's no risk at all to broadcast sats. The TV stations use geostationary (GEO) satellites, in orbit 23k miles above the equator. They all orbit the earth synchronously, so there are no collisions in that belt.

This and the other amateur (OSCAR) sats are in low earth orbit (LEO), 200-300 miles up. They fly around for a few years and eventually fall back and burn up. They don't come within >22,000 miles of your precious TV broadcast relay.

Build your own satellite...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stanford has plans to launch multiple 4-inch cube micro satellites ("CubeSat's") for about $ 25,000 per satellite to cover the launch costs.
(Stanford University CubeSat program)

A bunch of Universities and several amateur groups are currently building cube satellites as part of this project. At least one company has investigated selling cubesat kits. Here is an amateur group that is interested in producing cubesat kits that would sell for well under 5K per satellite (StenSat Group)

Micro satellites can be built with COTS discrete electronics. Microcontrollers such as the PIC processor have been radiation tested and should work fine in LEO orbits. High efficiency solar cells are the probably the most expensive items and if necessary they can probably be scrounged from various sources (surplus, rejects,etc...)