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

first satellite

[mgblst]

I wonder how much the very first satellite, sputnik would have cost? Surely it wouldnt be
that expensive to build the thing, just costs
alot to get it up there?

Re:first satellite

[Cerrian]

In regards to sputnik, it was essentially only a simple reciever and transmitter, built with parts that we could probably obtain today at Radio Shack.

Launching that sucker is a whole other financial issue. Materials alone for the rocket must have taken a nice gouge out of their alloted budget. Then you consider the years of R&D, Support and Logistics, and prior failed launches. At the time nobody really cared what the payload did once in space (except for military purposes) all they wanted to know was how high can we the bloody thing in the sky before it starts come crashing down (aka ballistic missile)

Hell, lauching from a Pegasus rocket today still costs a handful of million of dollars and it's one of the cheaper rockets in terms of cost per mass.

Ohboyohboyohboy, I love Karma

[rbeattie]

You can find a picture of the satelite and a bunch of info about the project here. http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/pcsat.html

-Russ

cost fo getting it into geo-stationary orbit

[the cleaner]

I wolud just love to sell my wifes car to get myself a sattelite of my own. I could even convince my buddies to sell their wifes/girlfriends cars to get that system built. :)

The big question is: How much higher is the price to get that thing up into an orbit where we constantly have access to it. I reccon, this might be a lot more expensive, but I would just love to have a communications-channel on my own...

Dont wake me up, please...

Light on info

[dohcvtec]

Neither this article, nor the previous one posted on /. mention what the USNA plans to do with the satellite. Many of us geeks would like to do something like this just to do it, but surely they must be doing something interesting with the satellite now that it is in orbit. What exactly is the fruit of $50,000 + 3 yrs. work + Boeing's grant?

Why launch in Alaska?

[redelm]

Launching a satellite from Alaska? Why? There's free delta-V available from the Earth's rotation if you launch from further south. You don't need to be on the equator.

Is it on some really wierd polar orbit where you don't want eastward velocity? They'd better really map out the space junk then, because most of it will be coming at them fast.

Lots of similar projects

[Mr. Eradicator]

I spent some time working on a similar project at the University of Washington in the Aero-Astro department. It was part of a group of nanosats funded by the AFOSR and DARPA.

These small satellite projects are good for design classes because they are small enough that one year's class can complete the design and the simplicity of the satellites makes for cheap overall costs. Thus, the university can usually afford to fund the construction of the satellite. Actually seeing your hard work being launched on a mission is quite fullfilling.

Everything that goes up comes down?

[HerbieStone]

As stated in the article, the satilite will work for 3 years if they are lucky. What I'd like to known is what happens after the thing stops working.
Will it end as some more orbiting trash or is there a way to bring the satilite down again?

My grandmother could build a better satellite....

[supernova87a]

This is great, just what we need -- more space junk floating up there. It would be nice if people thought as hard about how to get junk out of space as they do about putting junk into space. It's really getting pretty crowded up there. We have a whole Air Force division dedicated to tracking space junk:

• http://www.vandenberg.af.mil/associate_units/14a f/ links/mission.htm

What's next, Cletus and friends sending the dishwasher from the front yard into space?

Re:The $50,000 is a misnomer

[Mr. Eradicator]

Sure, it took lots of time to develop this satellite. That's just part of the deal. It's rather ironic that these students actually _paid_ to work on this satellite, if you consider their tuition costs.

The thing to remember here is that the goal of these satellites is not to produce _one_ lasting satellite. Because these sats are so cheap to build, several universities can design and build them. In some cases, a successful project could be used later on by the government in a larger scale.

Consider this ... what if some university designed a sturdy, yet cheap high-atmosphere/LEO weather satellite? Their design could be used to create a "Twister-esque" system of satellites. So, rather than sending up one extremely expensive satellite, we could send up thousands of smaller satellites to do the same task, but covering much more area. While these satellites only have lives of a few months to a year, they are so cheap that replacements are "petty change".

In the end, the cost of the development for this design wasn't nearly as much as it would have been for the single, much-larger satellite. You even get the bonus of giving some college students some very effective experience.