Slashdot Mirror
Orbit Your Own Satellite For $8,000
RobGoldsmith sends word of Interorbital's TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit, which allows anyone to send a half-pound payload to low-earth orbit for $8,000. Your satellite will fly to orbit from Tonga atop an Interorbital Systems NEPTUNE 30 rocket along with 31 other TubeSats. It will function for several weeks, then its orbit will decay and it will burn up in the atmosphere. Interorbital plans to send up a load of 32 TubeSats every month. If you pay in full in advance, you get slotted onto a particular scheduled launch. Here are Interorbital's product page and brochure (PDF).
Not really. Our best plan for artificial weaponized meteors is telephone-pole-to-crowbar sized rods of tungsten. Somehow I doubt that much tungsten weighs less than 0.5 pounds.
Satellite technology has had commercial applications for decades.
If you figure it costs about $10,000/lb to launch stuff into space, launching 16 pounds would leave $96,000 for administration and profit. The numbers are plausible. And if they start launching from a Virgin space plane, then the launch costs could do down dramatically.
Be relentless!
You didn't RTFA. For $8,000 this comes with a turnkey satellite + satellite development software environment,
with equipment that's already gone through R&D, and warrantied against failure during the trip into space, with space for additional cargo of up to 0.2kg. I'm sure they'd sell you the empty casing plus space on the rocket for less than $8 large (maybe as low as 4K? judging from their pricing model, it looks like the 4K is for the actual propellant/overhead costs), but it's going to cost a business a whole lot more than 8K to develop space-worthy electronics + software to put in the canister.
moox. for a new generation.
It's not BS. Last I checked you could put 1 KG into LEO for $25K. http://www.cubesatkit.com/
Cubesats typically hitch a ride with larger projects for cost efficiency.
http://cubesat.ece.uiuc.edu/
http://mtech.dk/thomsen/space/cubesat.php
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/cubesats.php
Doubtful in that mass budget. You couldn't just stick a thruster on it- you'd need a full attitude control system to make sure you were actually pointed in the right direction, and thruster(s), reaction wheels, etc would pretty rapidly use up all your mass.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Seriously, no. 2.9kJ is nothing. It's less than the biochemical energy in 0.1g of fat, only enough energy to lift 1kg 300m against gravity.
2.9kJ is certainly not sufficient for accelerating 1kg from 8km/s (LEO orbit) to 11km/s (escape velocity) or even just about 10km/s (geostationary transfer orbit perigee).
1J=1Nm=(1kg*m/s^2)*1m=1kg*(m/s)^2
Kinetic energy of 1kg at 8km/s: 0.5*1kg*(8000m/s)^2=32MJ
Kinetic energy of 1kg at 10km/s:
0.5*1kg*(10000m/s)^2=50MJ
That's a difference of 18MJ to get 1kg from LEO to a geostationary transfer orbit (and some more to turn that into a geostationary orbit).