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Students Design A Satellite Via Internet
Roland Piquepaille writes "A group of 250 students from many European universities has collectively designed a satellite by using a dedicated news server and weekly chats on Internet. By using the Web, the virtual team was able to move from design to construction in less than a year. The SSETI Express is currently under integration in one of the technology centers of the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands. Only a few selected members of the team will attend the launch which will be part of the Russian mission Cosmos DMC-3 in May 2005. The SSETI Express will embark three mini 'cubesats' for specific experiments while the main satellite will test a propulsion system and act as a transponder for amateur radio users. I sure hope that this collaborative action will be successful. Read this summary for more details."
Great. But will it work properly?
Roland Piquepaille ? Isn't that the guy who posts summaries to drive traffic up to his website?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
This is very impressive. The level of detail required on such a complex project is often daunting. To acheive a design with team members so far flung is nothing short of incredibe. I am not entirely sure what to make of it. It's a little like Linus' idea of "many eyeballs". Except in this case its not finding bugs its bulding satellites.
Imagine an extention of this work being used to solve problems and develop workarounds for breakage on the ISS or (dare I say it....) Mars.
This is really very cool.
Don't lame him, blame the guys that continue to post his stories. I have had several posts rejected only to show up the next day from someone else, including this guy.
it seems like more and more people are taking things into their own hands, bypassing the government agencies' bureaucratic process that goes for ages..
:p
we've seen the SpaceShipOne made it, and now a 'brute force' construction of a satellite.. this only leads to the question: what's next?? LEZ DO DIS!
-A simple hydrogen-powered car model that's ready to be mass produced? (instead of stuck being a prototype)
-better next-gen ASIMOs?
-advanced propulsion technology?
-human habitat for mars?
sheez, when I thnk about how people can combine their power and time to bruteforce-building something.. almost nothing is impossible
as for me, im still working on my warp machine
Everytime any sort of comparison comes up with respect to America versus Europe, all I hear from ordinary Americans or the political right is that European countries are on their asses and that America is the greatest country in the world, yadda yadda. I mean, after all, considering how "socialist" Europe is (at least according to the Right and most ordinary Americans), we are of course beating the pants off them at science, commerce, and of course economically.
Of course from time to time cruel reality intrudes upon that collective delusion. Like right now....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
lmao. There's a difference between some dinky 80 kg 2' x 2' x 2' cube designed to be launched into SSO at 668km and a ~9000 kg beast designed to propel itself out of HEO and into an orbit around the icy moons of Jupiter to study their formation and composition with a vast instrument suite.
I'm not knocking their efforts, and I admire the work they have done; but this team of students has only designed a small, light satellite that performs a couple of on-board experiments and relays the information back to Earth. There is practically 0 innovation in this project because everything they use is COTS technology. The only innovative part will be the data collected from the experiment, but even the experiment uses COTS technology.
I'm as ticked off about the crap that Lockheed (and others) have failed on, but they're nowhere near being replaced in the next decade.
I'm particularly excited about the success of this project because it ties into a project that I've been researching for a few weeks now but thought was impossible. Basically, it's using temporary subdermal GPS technology coupled with sats to enable the easy location and rescue of those who go missing in a hot zone (with my current focus being on Iraq/Afghanistan). Until today when I read this article, I was convinced that this would never see the light of day because -- even though I understood what needed to be done and could probably assemble a good group of people to do it -- I would run into government hurdle after government hurdle and the costs would simply be too high to do it privately. After reading this story though, I realize that isn't true and am quite excited about seriously pursuing this project! Now, to recruit, research, build and deploy.
I know there are people here who poo-poo this as something "already" done by the ham folks. But I believe that there is something substantially different about this success. On one hand, I think that we're going to see a lot of positives come from this. On the other hand I think there will be some negatives as governments start to realize that they no longer hold the monopoly on "gee-whiz" technology simply because they employ top scientists. They will be forced to sit up and take notice of private projects now and that could be a double edged sword. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"