TubeSat from Interorbital Systems

It looks as though Interorbital Systems is attempting to make their way into the personal space market. They have released a "TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit" on their website. As an alternative to the popular CubeSat, which many experimental amateur radio satellites have been constructed in, the main difference is that the price of launch seems to be included in the costs of the kit.

Apparently the satellites will be placed into a self decaying orbit around 310km above the Earths surface and stay in orbit for several weeks. They will then burn up in the earths atmosphere. The first launch is planned for the fourth quarter of 2010. The company gives possibly ideas for use as simple "HAM radio" satellites among a host of possible uses.

Interorbital Systems plans to launch 32 TubeSats per month on their Neptune 30 rocket. They will be released according to a reprogrammed timing sequence which prevents the satellites from clustering too close together.

This seems pretty neat but if you spend a few minutes on the website, there are plans to launch a manned orbital flight in 2010 on their Neptune 4000 rocket. Problem is, the Neptune 4000 rocket hasn't been built yet nor has the Neptune 30! They are still under development. More information can be found at the Interorbital Systems modular rocket page. Judge for yourself but I don't think I would trust that close of a deadline. Also, the ticket into space is offered at a discounted price of $250,000 dollers as compared to $5 million for the normal ticket. There is a full refund two years after the flight as a promotion. Personally, this sounds too good to be true. Why two years? Enough for the company to fall through?

While the $8,000 personal satellite sounds awesome it might be a better sell if they actually put the rocket into space first to prove they can do it. For now it seems like a start up space program in the Mojave Desert. It will be interesting to see what this company does in the next few years. If they TubeSat PS kits work then I think that it will be a huge success, especially with Universities!

AO-51 Apollo 11 Special Event

So I stayed after work to catch the 6:20PM pass of AO-51 (Amateur OSCAR 51 "Echo") over Massachusetts on July 20, 2009. There is a really nice parking lot which is raised up a bit so with an Arrow satellite antenna I can hear AO-51 with ease from just under 10 degrees above the horizon. I was unaware that the control operator of AO-51 played a continuous recording through the satellite to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission.

The transmission starts with a clip from John F. Kennedy giving his famous speach of America's mission to go to the moon in 10 years "... not because it is easy, but because it is hard....". It then goes into 30 seconds or so of Niel Armstrong (I think...) stating that the engines of Eagle are off, a few seconds later "the Eagle has landed". Following this is mission control telling them that most of the people in mission controle are "blue" and can finally breath again! A Robot36 encoded SSTV transmission follows.

I tried to record it with my laptop microphone but something wasn't working and its a silent audio clip. Maybe some other bloggers heard these commemorative transmissions or even anyone who is interested please feel free to comment and let me know what you think or experienced!