A real satellite project? | Suggestions and Questions | Forum

Here's a very tentative suggestion (or more of a question, really, I'm not super invested in it) about another project.

First of all, I am very aware that "project bloat" would be a bad thing.  We are so small right now that we can't really even handle two projects (whenever things are going well for CLLARE, OHKLA is stagnant and vice versa).  I don't want us to go mad starting up projects we don't have the infrastructure to handle.

That said, at the same time I have come to realise that maybe we can do a lot of really good work much faster than previously thought.  For some reason, a lot of our early planning seems to have completely ignored the possibility of using commercial launch vehicles.  There's been a mentality that we'll need to build ourselves a small sounding rocket, then build up to something from that which can put a microsatellite into LEO, then build that up, etc., etc.

Now, let me be clear:  I would love for us to eventually develop our own launch vehicle technologies and I think we should try to do it.

But, if we limit ourselves at any time to only projects that we can launch ourselves, we're going to waste a lot of time where we could be very productive.  We'll be playing with microsatellites at best for years.  Now, we've already warmed up a lot to the idea of launching the CLLARE stack onboard a Falcon 9.  Well, the Falcon 1 can put 420 kg into LEO for $8.9 million, today.  Why not do projects using commercial launchers while we are busy developing our own launchers?

Why don't we consider designing a satellite of some kind to be launched on a Falcon 1?

There was an idea mentioned a long time ago about an open source space telescope.  That's something we could probably plan and it would be a piece of cake compared to CLLARE.  No life support, no large propulsion once in space – basically just a telescope of some kind, a solar power system, a cold gas RCS and a communication system.  We could sell time on it to fund ourselves: for $1000 an hour, people can point the telescope wherever they want and the results are CC licensed.  This is a much less expensive or ambitious project than CLLARE, but would still produce useful experience for CLLARE (especially comms experience), and is far less trivial than OHKLA.  It's also 100% practical:  this is the kind of thing that astrophysics departments from respectable universities could actually throw their weight behind without appearing crazy.

Thoughts?

Post edited 3:16 am – January 14, 2010 by Luke Maurits

Here's something interesting that's very relevant to what we are discussing here.  I haven't been able to find much authoritative information on the project, what I'm pasting below is taken from a mailing list.

Hi all,

I know this is an old topic, but I just returned from vacation. The
Amateur Space Telescope was a project run in the 80's by students
and faculty at Rensaeller Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY and
the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. The AST was to fly
in a "get-a-way special" (GAS) canister on the shuttle. I don't know for
sure, but I believe the shuttle explosion effectively ended the GAS
program, thus ending the AST program.

The GAS program offered low cost launches as add-on cargo during a
mission dedicated to other programs. The GAS canisters were small
cylinders with just a few feet square of volume, lightweight, and with limited
power. Also, orbit choices were limited (they had to be reasonably close to
the orbit of the main shuttle payload of which they were a part because any
additional thrust or propulsion components had to fit within the same GAS
canister as the AST). The AST had to be designed to work within those limits.

I believe that construction proceeded quite far on engineering mock-ups
and test platforms. I don't believe the final vehicle was ever built, nor were
optics ever made.

I could be very wrong about any of this. My involvement was only vicarious
(a friend of mine at that time was a student-member of the AST team). Maybe
there are parts still in existence? Maybe we can find a member of that team
with more information? Resurrecting the AST would be a great boon to
amateurs and professionals alike.

Although this was apparently an optical telescope, tracking down people who were involved in this project might be a good and easy way to quickly build up a competent team to work on a new CSTART open source telescope.  Importantly, I notice that one of the universities involved was in Rochester, which is where brmj is.  It may even be the same university brmj is attending!  If he were interested he may be able to ask around to find people who were involved and chat to them face to face.

I'm really starting to feel like getting enough support for us to be able to manage this project may be fairly achievable.

Absolutely.  If a few professors at RIT were onboard word would pretty quickly spread to other universities.  Chances are any decent sized university should have at least one and possibly several grad students who would be excited to help out.  Some of them may eventually come to also work on CLLARE (or at least spread word of CLLARE to fellow students from engineering, etc.).

Rizwan said:

Also it will be bad PR if we keep adding projects and none of them materialise.

This is very true.  I think we should approach this idea slowly – see if we can find people from the old project and see if they are still interested and can agree on what sort of telescope would be most useful today.  We could try to get rough numbers of likely interested students etc. and not actually name/announce the project until it was clear there would be enough interest to support it.