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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).
its orbit will decay and it will burn up in the atmosphere
That's just a ridiculously elaborate cremation.
Half pound chunks that burn up on reentry aren't going to hurt anything.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
A couple of rockets is piss compared to the millions of cars, factories, and volcanoes in the world. "Straw that breaks the camel's back" is just a strawman (pun not intended :/) argument used by ludites that have something against cool technologies for some reason.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Laws of diminishing returns. Suppose your project is to image a lake at 123.456 nm. Once you got that done, surviving longer means that you can reobserve the same lake n times or look at m other lakes, but the value of that isn't n+m times that of the original mission.
Wouldn't the extra distance hurt the resolution of the observations it makes, or the strength of the radio signals it emits?
Actually, I was really far to tentative with that response. I think the real answer is "no way in hell." Just too much energy that you'd need to store in that half pound somehow.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
If The Pirate Bay hosted their site on one of those satellites, the law can't get them because there's no space court!
Low earth orbit is above the law, literally, isn't it?
Yes, I think I can safely assure you that your pirate satellite will not be arrested. This may be small consolation to the people who build and launch it, who themselves will inconveniently not be in LEO.
This river running next to my factory is huge, and the sea it runs to is even bigger... so who will notice if I dump a barrel of waste arsenic in that river?
Now look in what kind of mess this attitude has gotten us.