On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 17:19 -0400, Robert Bruninga wrote:
A school to provide the $50,000 launch..... Anything from keeping 50 hams from donating $1000 a piece and just buying a launch
- no school involved?
Sure, anyone. I havent priced the latest launch integratiojn costs from the Cubesat Program recently, but the $50k was their original plan...
The first thing that occurred to me was that if people like Mark Shuttleworth and Richard Garriot have got $20-odd million to throw around on space tourism, then perhaps they might be amenable to making a hefty donation to amateur satellite launches.
I can see packet cubesats being a great help with communications for things like the OLPC project.
Furthermore, the cost of launching is (for the moment) only going to go down - can we get a discount for buying a batch of launches? Has anyone priced up getting flights from the Iranians?
Gordon