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

[Brian Molnar]

I have been *VERY* interested in doing this for some time now, so if you
want some help, I'm definitely down. Plus I'm very willing to contribute
financially.

- Molnar

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Mikolaj Habryn <dichro at rcpt.to> wrote:

> 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.
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