[Space] spacebridge

Ed Gutman ed.gutman at gmail.com
Tue Dec 22 17:37:00 UTC 2009


Hey all,

Ariel referred me to this project yesterday and sounds like it will be fun!
While I currently I work in web dev/tech, I have my masters in Aerospace Eng
and worked for about a year, on and off, in my university's cubesat program
(Polysat). Most of my experience comes in terms of ADC and mission design,
so if these are areas you need help in, I'd be more than happy to help out.
Of course, I'll help out anywhere it may be needed.

That all being said, I haven't done any astro work since college, so I'm
probably a bit on the rusty side, but nothing that a little book readin'
can't fix.

Ed

--
[ @eddie | edgutman.com | remarkify.com | 650.450.4248 ]


On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 23:02, Mikolaj Habryn <dichro at rcpt.to> wrote:

> Fantastic first meeting! About a dozen people attended, and we were
> all too busy talking to take minutes.
>
> Jonathan's observation - easily pulling together a group of people
> with enthusiasm for the subject and discovering so many tendrils into
> related industry and non-professional areas, not only from the
> attendees but from the other people generally hanging around in the
> area, is what makes hackerspaces so awesome.
>
> General consensus is that balloon launches are a great place to start
> economically and aspirationally, graduating to long-endurance balloons
> that can survive at altitude for days/weeks/months, and doing
> something cool with it (like laser pointers and DLPs to draw the
> noisebridge logo on clouds around the world).
>
> Retroactive minutes are in wave, subject to revision, and if ops
> respond favourably to my humble request for the appropriate plugin,
> will shortly appear on the wiki, but here's a snapshot for the moment:
>
> Discussions:
>
> rockets
> * hybrid (eg rubber + nox) rockets
>  * non-explosive!
>    * (well, *less* explosive)
>  * rockets in general
>    * 15,000 feet trivially (probably unlicensed); 100,000 feet
> possible ($25k rocket), 400,000 feet planned
> introductions (I don't remember the details, sorry - please add your
> own as appropriate!)
>  * Mikolaj: ready to supply ideas, enthusiasm and comic relief. No
> useful competence to speak of.
>  * Lisa: (enthusiasm)
>  * Ariel: worked at NASA knows everybody that knows anybody, started
> spacehack.org + (enthusiasm)
>  * Brian: (enthusiasm + math/physics?)
>  * Jonathan: had no idea there was a meeting, gets excited anyway,
> particularly about hybrid rockets
>  * Christie: EE, computery person into robotics and stuff (Space geek)
>  * Andreas: (mild enthusiasm)
>  * Sam: Tech writer for NASA in the past, Space Tourism enthusiast,
> very knowledgeable, dapper hat, way impressive rolodex (but didn't
> slap Richard Branson when he had the chance)
>  * Miloh: is all about the balloon building, wants to see launch
> plans for early spring.
>  * Kelly: wants nothing to do with us, but has an excellent mother
> who should meet us next week
>  * Todd: launches rockets for fun, does balloon kites, works for
> sofcoast who build commercial helium(?) aerostats and could help lots
> with related practicalities
>  * Adam: rockets + ham radio background, launched at altamon
> satellite payloads
>  * tube/can/cube-sats
>  * $8k launch for cube-sat (potentially; not well proven
> http://www.interorbital.com/)
>  * pong-sat (with gerbil)
> space tourism
>  * sam has ideas about running talks on the subject at noisebridge
>  * could potentially interest people from jpaerospace and others to present
>  * good industrial design ideas for zero-grav could lead to
> experimental flights on the vomit comet ((r), (tm) nasa) - "parabolic
> flight experience"
> long-endurance balloons
>  * $30 balloon, $80 helium, hydrogen?
>  * Materials:
>    * possibly getting fabrics from Todd's company donated?
>    * What fabrics used? Latex? (latex for weather balloons, can be
> treated to lower helium permeability; aluminized mylar used in r/c
> blimps; mikolaj's experience is that they stay at least partially
> inflated for 2-3 weeks)
>    * Seams and sealing: Sewing? Gluing?
>  * interesting payloads:
>    * optical observation - telescopes (will lenses still refract
> correctly at 1% of atmospheric pressure?), ccds will have lower
> thermal noise due to lower temperature, higher radiation noise
>    * fractional distillation - atmospheric still! (to resupply gas in
> the envelope?)
> spin tiny payloads on tether to (orbital?) velocity
>    * laser pointers to draw on clouds
>  * power
>    * gammavoltaics!
>    * wind power? difficult if floating with wind, but you could maybe
> drop a surface on a tether far enough to be in a different air current
> and generate power/steer from there
>  * telemetry
>    * too high for cdma/gsm
>    * HF ham stuff can reach a long way but takes lots of power
> with good enough buoyancy control, could dip down to 3g altitudes,
> download, re-ascend
>    * otherwise taking pictures requires payload recovery
>    * commercial gps have anti-cruise-missile code that kicks in at
> altitude and speed limits, but can do a gps receiver in gnuradio (!)
>  * stability
>    * single balloons seem to spin lots
>    * can do multiple balloons - jpaerospace have a standardized rig
> for odd numbers of balloons
>    * launch a rocket from the middle of a set of balloons - 'rockoon'
>    * jpaerospace has a plan for a smaller more robust balloon to 140k
> feet; then transfer to a giant mile-scale balloon that couldn't
> survive ground-level weather to transfer to (near?) orbit
> _______________________________________________
> Space mailing list
> Space at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/space
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/space/attachments/20091222/009876cf/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Space mailing list