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Space On a Shoestring
An anonymous reader writes, "Three engineering students from Cambridge University plan to send an unmanned craft into space for £1,000 ($1,880) and have just sent a test mission up 32 km for a lot less. Their snaps from the upper atmosphere are impressive, and were taken by a balloon equipped with off-the-shelf technology including GSM text messaging, radio communications, and an ordinary 5-megapixel camera. They now plan to use a similar craft as a launching stage to get a cheap rocket into space." There's also a video of the balloon launch.
Picture this, soon their balooning costs will skyrocket to reach even greater heights.
Have you read my journal today?
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/Numbers/Math/Math ematical_Thinking/designing_a_high_altitude.htm
http://www.amsat.org/amsat/balloons/balloon.htm
I'm not fat, just big boned...
So GSM phones do work at that height?
Why do we need inflight GSM mini stations then?
-- ubersonic Kfz Versicherung
I was in the same program last year at a different university (LSU). The stuff is somewhat exciting, but I don't really think it's newsworthy. I feel like it only made the news because it of the famous university name tacked on...
Regardless, what they've done is an outstanding achievement. The year before mine our school tried to take a picture up there (~100,000 feet) but it didn't work because the cold temperature changed the timing of some electronics, causing them to malfunction =/
I was in charge of the thermal stuff, and let me tell you, it's pretty hard to keep it warm but not so warm that the sun toasts it. And keep in mind the payload, as they call it, could only be 500 grams!
This (working to launching rockets from baloons) has been done in the US for quite some time. There are plenty of student baloon payload systems and in fact this week there is a confrence going this week on adressing just this topic. As far as using baloons as a launch platform, there is group from Huntsville AL http://chapters.nss.org/al/HAL5/HALO/that has been launching for quite some time. Good luck to the team from the UK but if any one realy interested in getting things done, perhaps all these individual groups should join forces. Just My 2 Cents
Faith_Healer -- The antethsis to almost everything, and the worlds worst speller.
...that this isn't the mystery object NASA spotted today?
Sending rockets out into space is pretty easy, but the real trick is orbit. Cheap shots to the upper atmosphere don't do a lot of good in terms of launching satellites and other objects into orbit, although I'm sure they can provide experience with the technology. Achieving orbit requires a lot more energy. There's a reason missiles and rockets are the size they are.
What self respecting nerd posts a 20 second 240 x 320 video using Raw RGB that weighs in at 69MB??!!
Some context, to help understand this: Earth's Atmosphere, as per WikiPedia.
You can see that weather balloons are in the 18-50 km range, which is what we expect, because that's what they're using, and they got to 32 km.
Three engineering students from Cambridge University plan to send an unmanned craft into space for £1,000 ($1,880)...
So they're sending a high-end Dell laptop into space? It's been awhile since something blew up on the way into space.
Having made several flights lately in light aircraft I've been rather bored and have happily sat watching the bars on my mobile phone...Now I didn't realise there was a full on tin foil hat issue here though my results are as follows:
:)
Outbound from where I live on a Nokia 6230 I had signal for a decent phone call up to ~5,000 feet and could send SMS to around ~6,000 feet, soon after this I lost signal. Leaving on the way back to here I had phone signal for a call up to ~7,000 feet and lost phone and SMS at about the same time.
The Blackberry 7230 I had with me made it another 500-1000 feet over my Nokia in regards to signal though GPRS didn't fare so well. Luckily Brick doesn't require phone signal.
We tended to fly at around 12,000 feet most times and those observations from one trip seem about right for the rest plus I can confirm from having to drive several of the distances that there is full phone coverage a long the routes.
I ate your fish.
To put something into a stable orbit, you must not only achieve height, but tangential velocity. A rocket that is capable of achieving the neccessary velocity (around 7000 m/s depending on how heavy the object is) will probably not be lifted by a baloon any time soon.
In addition to that, 32km is not high enough to put something into orbit. You need to be around 180km to make several stable orbits. And if you want something up there for years, you need to be 250+ to avoid drag from the outer atmosphere.
This is just height. This is not orbit. There is not nearly enough energy here to make orbit.
Still, quite an amazing feat for the costs invovled. My hat is off to them.
Orbit is a bit much to ask, though I think that 60 miles would be newsworthy. The amateur rocketeers have already been there, but accomplishing it on the cheap would be remarkable.
To get there from 20 miles would still require a considerable rocket, though, and I'd be very surprised to see them pull that off for under US$2k. That additional 40 miles is still a considerable event in amateur rocketry, even with the wind essentially eliminated, and that's from a standing start.
And it's a very, very long way to orbit from there (though somewhat easier if you're not planning to get whatever it is back down safely).
As usual, the press-release writers have sold an interesting event ("nice pictures taken from high up cheap") and tried to spin it into a big deal ("we're going to space!"). I imagine the actual engineers are shaking their heads.
When I tried it from a motor glider in a fairly remote area (few cells, large areas) I got a snotty letter from Orange saying that roaming at 50kts between very non-adjacent cells made their network shit itself. I wish I'd kept the letter...
launching a giant multi-million dollar rocket filled with liquid oxygen with 2/3 of that fuel carrying just the weight of the fuel is so terribly efficient
because launching the rocket is EFFECTIVE, compared to a balloon that will only reach about midway/three-fourths of the way in the atmosphere, only to fall back to the earth. the rocket has enough to push at a force that will allow it to get into orbit. not efficient, but it's the only way we get the job done.
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
Imagine how much fear a group scare monger's can spread by twisting facts.
Can you say http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb ?
That's a sounding rocket. In terms of performance, it seems comparable to the WAC Corporal of 1944, or maybe the Aerobee of 1947.
Nothing wrong with building one cheaply, but it's not a step forward.
I had signal for a decent phone call up to ~5,000 feet and could send SMS to around ~6,000 feet, soon after this I lost signal.
More likely you had too much signal. From altitude you tie up one RF channel on several dozen towers in range instead of running at reduced power on the closest tower. This blanket coverage of dozens of towers tying up a channel without the ability to hand your signal to a single tower and free up the frequency on other towers for use by others is why they don't permit phone use on aircraft. If the system is smart, it may have shut down your phone to clear the frequency as the towers noticed an even signal strength from one phone over dozens of towers. You simply did not get a tower assignment at altitude.
The truth shall set you free!
For this balloon thing though, could put the GSM unit into a downward facing pringles tube, increasing the signal strength, narrowing the transmitted area, and sticking to their "cheap, very very cheap" idea :-)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Ballons probably don't need the same sort of clearance. Many weather ballons are launched from weather stations which are often located at airports. I used to work for a company building weather ballon tracking equipment and we'd go test our prototype kit at the baloon launch site which was right next to the end of an international airport runway (right in the high security area next to where you see the planes land with puffs of smoke coming off their tyres). At least twice I can recall flying along at altitude in a commercial airliner and hearing the pilot say: "folks if you look out of the left window you can see a weather ballon". These things carry radar reflectors etc and pose very little danger to aviation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We did extensive drop tests to make sure that the payload wouldn't hurt anybody if it landed on them even if the parachute failed to open properly.
The casing is made of a type of foam that is very good at absorbing impacts, and the whole thing doesn't weigh very much.
If it landed on you with the parachute open you'd just brush it off. If it landed on you without the parachute you'd get a bruised head but would be okay.
Our launches are insured with £5m public liability cover. Arranging this insurance was quite difficult though.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Maybe that's a turban legend.
Sorry.
Anything you do can get you slashdotted, including nothing.
Camera it is! Plus potentially scientific or student experiments that would like 3 minutes of freefall for considerably less than the price of most sounding rockets. The next step after the 100km rocket is a bit tentative but we would like to add control systems sufficient to put it through a fairly small window in space and time, as a concept demonstrator for something that would latch onto a rotating space tether. At the moment we have no plans to launch anything into orbit. Without MAJOR sponsorship and a LOT of skill and time, orbit is out of the reach of amateur and student projects IMO. See the development cost of Pegasus, or look at SpaceX and how many $M they have spent so far despite being very lean and efficient.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Yes we will be trying a directional GSM antenna on a later flight, just out of interest more than anything else. The results from the radio were so good that we are planning to spend the next couple of flights proving that a GSM phone is not required, that would save considerable mass and money.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Carl already gets woken up around 6:30am most days by pilots calling the number they've seen on the NOTAM. "Are you launching in the next half hour?" "No I'm in bed, leave me alone"
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
I actually worked in the same lab as these guys, so here's my input: The reason that this was an important launch was not the photos, although those are cool, but to test the electronics of the tracker devices they'dd designed and built. If you read their website at http://www.cuspaceflight.co.uk/ you'll see the other projects - the rocket to space, but also a controllable parachute that can descend to within 100m of a given location. All fairly impressive stuff, given that they've only jsut finished their 1st year of study. As for costs - only a couple of hundred pounds...
We deliberately waited for a day when the jetstream was relatively calm, it was around 40 knots that day which isn't much at all. Also it helped that the low altitude winds were close to opposite the jetstream winds so it went west and then east. And we put quite a bit of excess helium in to get a rapid ascent rate, around 1000 ft/min. So it was up through the relatively shallow band of jetstream (20000~40000 ft) quite quickly. The winds above that are slow indeed. We started following it after it had reached about 28km on the ascent (we predicted that it should burst around 28-29km, the balloon ended up being a bit stronger than spec and it burst at 32km) and found it about 30 minutes after landing. The GPS is nice to have, it would have taken much longer to do it by radio direction finding. Anyway these things usually land in fields because there are lots of fields around, and despite the purple parachute they aren't blindingly obvious unless you're looking for them. So I don't think it's too likely that someone else would find it first. If they did, hopefully they'd be nice and call the phone number printed on it.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
1) Get an untraceable PAYG mobile
2) Load it onto a remote-controlled plane
3) Fly it around over central London at lunchtime
4) ???
5) Try to explain to Hastur and Ligur exactly how this constitutes
6) Profit!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
In the research center where I work, one of the guys who had worked on the GSM spec gave a talk on this.
He said that the big problem was that it is very tricky for an airborne phone to decide what cell it's closest to, since it can see loads of them and they're all pretty much the same distance (the downward distance is now very large compared to the on-ground inter-cell distance). This means your phone keeps jumping between cells, which incurs quite a lot of overhead on the network (and if you had a planeload of people doing it, it would be very chaotic!).
Bandwidth isn't the issue. It's the server hosting it, that belongs to the Student Run Computing Facility, that is
In the US, notice/permission to launch ballons such as this can usually be done by calling the nearest FAA ATC facility 6 to 24 hours before beginning the operation and giving them the particulars. The applicable regulation is FAR Part 101. http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/faa_regula tions/
I've seen very simular problems on mountain top. On top of South Sister in Centeral Oregon (Western US) at 10,350 feet I've seen hapless users try to use their cell phones to no avail. As much as some twit on cell phones in a wilderness area chokes me I told him to just drop off the summit - any direction - and sure enough he was able to connect. His problem was too many cells. Dropping even a few meter below the summit limited his line of sight to a reasonable (and planned for) number of cells.