[Space] Spacebridge micro-satellite

[Mikolaj Habryn]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Glen Jarvis <glen at glenjarvis.com> wrote:
> I mentioned that my old school was involved in a project to create a
> micro-satellite. Ours were to be launched for us if we won the competition:
> http://news.mst.edu/2004/03/students_create_tethered_satel.html
> I'm thinking, do you think we can actually do our own launch? Is that even
> possible some day?

Hitching a lift on somebody else's commercial launch or paying
commercial rates makes it possible now, as I understand it, and
somebody on Sunday mentioned that there were amateur groups working on
400,000 ft altitude rockets there, which is technically space as well.
Expensive, though.

> The Mrs. Sat micro-satellite was small enough to fit in a
> micro-wave oven, but I don't know how much she weighed.
> There were lot of hurdles to get past (like how to resolve the problem of
> cosmic waves changing bits in the computer - a big *big* problem that far
> out in space).. --  A lot of redundancy and checksum'ing  was discussed when
> I last heard from the team working on this.
> I know this is thinking a bit big... but, imagine a spacebridge satellite in
> geo-spacial orbit above noisebridge :)  Can we do that?

That's harder ;) Sub-orbital is probably achievable for Spacebridge.
LEO requires a *whole* lot more energy; geosync requires even more
energy plus dealing with a much, much nastier environment. Probably
not in the next 3 months, I'm thinking.

m.

>
>
> Glen
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