Satellite launch for 300 USD

The new horizon of the era of privatization of the universe is gradually emerging before humanity with projects like KickSat, PocketSpacecraft.

Space exploration has long been the exclusive playground for governments, large corporations, scientific circles with a cost of up to hundreds of millions of dollars each and need a decade to plan. However, over the past week, there have been 104 civilians on the earth who can claim that they have a satellite on orbit, with each launch being just under $ 300. This means the era of space exploration has opened.

The pioneers of the new era are all supporters of the KickSat project, initiated by Michael Johnson and Luke Bussell. Launched in December 2011 on Kickstarter, the project attracted more than twice the initial estimate, with nearly $ 75,000 in investment from the crowd. Three years later, there were 104 KickSat satellites on SpaceX orbit during a refueling trip to the International Space Station. The big idea behind KickSat is to find ways to shrink the size of satellites, thereby allowing costs to be evenly distributed to hundreds or even thousands of customers at the same time.

The system of 104 Sprite satellites has been placed on low earth orbit - (Photo: KickSat)

The biggest cost for each space flight is at the ground-off stage, with costs up to $ 100,000 / kg of the missile-fired object. Meanwhile, KickSat's satellites, called Sprite , are very different from the bulky and expensive satellites moving around the earth. Weighs 5gr and is scaled to the size of a human hand, Sprite is designed according to the same principle as a Raspberry Pi computer, with the brain just as big as a nail head but capable of operating the computer system's capacity. American Voyager ships were launched in the late 1970s. Combined with cheap solar panels, some small devices and memory antennas, you have a satellite capable of transmitting data. Data about the earth.

For enthusiastic people like Bussell and Johnson, projects like KickSat are just the beginning of the era of space privatization, promising a trend of space exploration for everyone. Many lessons learned from the KickSat mission used in Mr. Johnson's next project are PocketSpacecraft, temporarily translating 'pocket travel ship'.

'There are more than 1 million celestial bodies in the solar system that are worth exploring, from planets, moons, asteroids to comets, and since the space era has been opened, there are an average of about 1 every year. The ship is launched out of the boundary of the globe ' , according to Johnson. To realize this dream, the team behind the PocketSpacecraft project is attempting to further reduce the size of the new version satellite, called Scout , in the hope that the device will be able to travel long distances to the face. moon. With an average thickness of about 0.02mm, Scout is designed to compress thousands of satellites into a single launch, thereby drastically reducing the cost for each mission. Johnson also drew a promising perspective, that the ultra-thin Scout might soon be able to reach other distant targets in the solar system.