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

[davidfine]

 You space nerds should rlly talk to these people.  Illutron is a Danish
art collective which does a lot of technically challenging projects. For
example, one of them is working on launching himself into orbit.

 they were next to ddi at a festival and so a few of that crew knows a few
of them. I am just in contact with Bent , he says they're coming to the US
in summer to build something for burningman (prob not a rocket)

 http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ [1]
http://www.illutron.dk/posts/225 [2]
 --D

 On Wed 16/12/09 9:45 PM , "Brian Molnar" brian.molnar at gmail.com sent:
 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  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/ [3] - 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/
[4]
 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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Links:
------
[1] http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
[2] http://www.illutron.dk/posts/225
[3] http://www.members.shaw.ca/sonde/
[4] http://jpaerospace.com/
[5] https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
[6]
http://webmail.sonic.net/parse.php?redirect=https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
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