General / Off-Topic Pocket Spacecraft

[cassius]

Spotted this and thought it looked very interesting...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...pocket-spacecraft-on-a-mission-to-th?ref=live

I guess it may be viewed by some as interplanetary littering, but thought i'd share

 

[Kerrash]

Uuuuhh.
£100 to drop a piece of paper, from space?
Did I follow that correctly? I am not sure I get the point. :S

 

[cassius]

Not paper ...

Your Scout is a polyimide disc (a material used for flexible circuit boards, spacesuits and, of particular relevance for this application, high performance solar sails) held taut by a NiTi memory metal hoop that can also double as an antenna.

At a very basic level they do say the simplest thing you can do with them is to have a picture or message etched on it. But for those wanting more...

Scouts are solar powered with integrated optical and radio transceivers and can have sensors including a single pixel optical sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature sensor, strain gauges and more. If you are comfortable with Arduino level software development, you can run your own software on Software and Hardware Development Scouts. We’ll provide a web based integrated development environment (IDE) so you can write code, test on a Scout simulator and in a virtual solar system and upload your design to your own Software Development Scout.

I suppose the £99 cheapo version that gets launched into Earth orbit is a bit of a waste. Probably vapourises on re-entry!!! Like many Kickstarters, there are down sides, but i liked the idea of sending something up there. Not that i could afford it lol

 

[Mobius]

glad this wasn't posted in the Worthy Kickstarters thread, as its not worth it.

 

[Captain Slick]

woa, did somebody say Pocket Rocket??

...from an "Orbiter" forum long ago.

 

[Comisar Augustus]

Spotted this and thought it looked very interesting...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...pocket-spacecraft-on-a-mission-to-th?ref=live

I guess it may be viewed by some as interplanetary littering, but thought i'd share

Yeah just saw this too and thought about posting a thread... thought it was quite cool that someone's doing something like this actually.

 

[The Land]

That is weird... and ambitious.... hmmmmmm!!

 

[Quantum Enigma]

Oh. My. God. You can send stuff to space!

This sounds like an excellent service. I think it sould be funded by public money, and everyone gets at least one free go.

I myself will be buying a few of these to be sent out at regular intervals during the year. I might ask them to point mine the other way though, probably with the message "FREE PARTY!" and a map back to earth.

I wonder if they could attach a small firework rocket to make them go a bit quicker?