Comment Some Answers (Score 1) 98
To answer some of the questions in this thread:
- Yes, $20k is actually cheap to build a satellite, but most of the schools did not buy kits and instead fabricated their sats themselves or bought COTS pieces from different sources.
- 97.4 degree inclination is sun-sync and was not chosen by the schools. The cubesats are piggy-backing on the Russian rocket that has a full-sized foreign bird as a primary payload.
- If you're asking yourself what's the point of a project like this, you've missed the idea completely - the most important being student education. Today kids in elementary schools are learning to program in c to control simple robots, in high school they create teams of controlled and autonomous robots to compete in games, in college they are building satellites. What did YOU do in school? It's insulting to degrade/downplay the significance of putting a working satellite in space and sending data (whether it be a beacon or otherwise) as designed. If it was so easy to do, there wouldn't be billions of dollars worth of failed satellites floating in space or disintegrated into atmospheric dust.
- The altitude these cubes will be at is low enough to eventually decay in some years, so contributing to space debris is (hopefully) not an issue.
- The launch cost was distributed among the schools participating. The rate has changed over time, but at last I recall it was about $40k per 10 cm, 1 kg cube - that's a smokin good deal for putting anything into space.
- One drawback to this piggy-back launch approach is actual launch occurs when the primary payload is complete. Miss the bus and you're walking. Additionally, some of the foreign bird projects get ridiculously delayed. Some of the cubes on this launch had been completed and sat through delay after delay for 2 years.
However this satellite opportunity still can't currently be beat for a low-cost, quick production, high-risk, satellite project.
- Yes, $20k is actually cheap to build a satellite, but most of the schools did not buy kits and instead fabricated their sats themselves or bought COTS pieces from different sources.
- 97.4 degree inclination is sun-sync and was not chosen by the schools. The cubesats are piggy-backing on the Russian rocket that has a full-sized foreign bird as a primary payload.
- If you're asking yourself what's the point of a project like this, you've missed the idea completely - the most important being student education. Today kids in elementary schools are learning to program in c to control simple robots, in high school they create teams of controlled and autonomous robots to compete in games, in college they are building satellites. What did YOU do in school? It's insulting to degrade/downplay the significance of putting a working satellite in space and sending data (whether it be a beacon or otherwise) as designed. If it was so easy to do, there wouldn't be billions of dollars worth of failed satellites floating in space or disintegrated into atmospheric dust.
- The altitude these cubes will be at is low enough to eventually decay in some years, so contributing to space debris is (hopefully) not an issue.
- The launch cost was distributed among the schools participating. The rate has changed over time, but at last I recall it was about $40k per 10 cm, 1 kg cube - that's a smokin good deal for putting anything into space.
- One drawback to this piggy-back launch approach is actual launch occurs when the primary payload is complete. Miss the bus and you're walking. Additionally, some of the foreign bird projects get ridiculously delayed. Some of the cubes on this launch had been completed and sat through delay after delay for 2 years.
However this satellite opportunity still can't currently be beat for a low-cost, quick production, high-risk, satellite project.
