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Using an Old Space-Suit as a Satellite

Posted by timothy on from the out-of-fashion-anyhow dept.

Andrew-Unit writes "The ARRL has an interesting article about an amateur satellite project where some amateur radio electronics will be crammed into an old spacesuit and chucked out of the window of the International Space Station."

2 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why a spacesuit? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The spacesuit is already onboard the ISS and has been declared as surplus.

    quarter inch steel plate has the disadvantage of sitting on Earth, and would take up valuable space on a supply rocket.
    They might as well use the suit for something.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  2. Re:Space Junk by ColaMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thousands of tons of crap enters the atmosphere every day. You could probably make a suit out of ,say, plutonium and still have negligible effect considering:

    One spacesuit+electronics - 50kg, tops.
    Atmosphere - 5,000,000,000,000,000,000kg (by most estimates).

    Even guesstimating that it might incinerate and cover an area 1/8th the size of the globe during re-entry, that's still pretty much SFA. Even with plutonium being the nasty thing that it is.

    Of course, the associated problems of dealing with 50kg of plutonium in one place at the same time is left as an exercise for the reader.

    --

    You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
    There is a lot of hype here.