Student Satellite Ready for Space

An anonymous contributor writes "Nearly one hundred students from all over Europe have been working hard on SSETI Express Satellite (Student Space Education and Technology Initiative). Last week a handful of students gathered at the Netherlands to put the finishing touches to the flight model. The final exams in the space simulators will follow in January - the last hurdle before launch in May 2005. The satellite has been largely designed and built via the Internet. The students keep each other informed about the latest developments using a special news server and weekly chat sessions."

Comments

Student budget?

[flumps]

SETI Express is not only built by students, but also has a student budget - preferably for free. "We don't have money, but we still have to get things done", explains Karl Kaas Laursen from Denmark.

Is it just me, or does anyone have visions of a couple of beercans with coat hanger antenni floating about in space?

The Linux of satellites?

[quamaretto]

Very odd to see the bazaar model being applied to something as expensive as a satellite. This gives me a weird mental image of Linus Torvalds, waving around a penguin plushie, riding a nuclear missile as it falls toward the ground.

This just seems a little too far out; at least software cannot be used to physically destroy something that costs millions of dollars (in most cases; google "HCF"?). This is a serious raising of the stakes in terms of what a collaborative, less centralized group of people can accomplish and what responsibilities can be laid on them.