[Noisebridge-discuss] spacebridge? hackers(in)space?

[Mikolaj Habryn]

There's been lots of articles of late about school kids sending
weather balloons with cameras up to 100,000 feet for peanuts and
getting amazing pictures. These projects kinda lack ambition -
although I'll confess to being grudgingly impressed nonetheless.

By contrast, these guys are my heros -
http://www.members.shaw.ca/sonde/ - they carry a glider up with a
home-built autopilot that navigates back to where they're waiting for
it (sometimes upside-down). Their stories are the reason that I have a
2.6m r/c glider in my cube at work (that I'm too scared of to actually
fly).

Also, a friend pointed out on the weekend that http://jpaerospace.com/
have somewhat stolen my thunder, but, dammit, I still think there's
some fun to be had here.

Things I'm keen to work on:

Buoyancy control for high-altitude balloons - most of these guys send
balloons up until they burst and then recover payload under a
parachute. It shouldn't be too hard to build something that can hold
altitude by moving gas between envelope and rigid container (a full
day-night cycle might be hard, but you never know - at lower altitudes
you could potentially condense water vapor and electrolyze to
replenish hydrogen supplies). Talking to the blimpduino guys at maker
faire a year or two back, they were also interested in the idea of
having a buoyancy control system at the smaller scale, but didn't
think it could be done in their weight budget. I think they're wrong,
and I even had the parts to prove it at one stage.

1kg of batteries has enough energy to accelerate a 10g weight to
orbital velocity.  I had a napkin once that claimed that a reasonably
efficient motor could achieve that by spinning a reasonable length
tether at reasonable g forces, but I think I got the numbers wrong at
the time :P OTOH, yesterday I saw a tech talk by the quick launch guys
(giant hydrogen cannons ftw) where they mentioned trivially
g-hardening consumer electronics to 3200g, so maybe there's still a
way of doing it with a reasonable length of practical tether - not
that I know *what* tether, how it will behave when the outer section
of it is travelling at transonic speeds, drag losses at 100k feet, and
what kind of interesting payload you can fit into 10 grams, but these
are implementation details.

Um. I had other ideas, but can't think of them right at the moment.
Anyone else have related projects or want to play? I intend to grab
some weather balloons from ebay, a cylinder of hydrogen and maybe some
ardupilots and carefully skirt various FAA regulations in the next
couple of months.

m.

PS: and Black Rock City Spaceport - 'coz fuck steampunk.