Wait, wait ... So they were asking for 30K, got 70K and that let them hitch a ride on a NASA rocket and have a satellite deployed. This seems oddly affordable. What am I missing?
The KickSat was very small, about half the size of a desktop computer.
There are satellites that are bus-sized and have antennas as large as a football field (5-6 tons and 350 foot antennas) floating around up there, those are the billion dollar ones. Their computer components are hundreds and thousands of times what consumer grade components cost, plus the satellites sometimes have stealth technologies, boosters, and extremely expensive cameras and other sensors.
The KickSat hardware was consumer grade, which was most of the reason for the low cost, the lack of sufficiently radiation hardened components also was the reason it malfunctioned according to their update.
Comments
Wait, wait ... So they were asking for 30K, got 70K and that let them hitch a ride on a NASA rocket and have a satellite deployed. This seems oddly affordable. What am I missing?
The KickSat was very small, about half the size of a desktop computer.
There are satellites that are bus-sized and have antennas as large as a football field (5-6 tons and 350 foot antennas) floating around up there, those are the billion dollar ones. Their computer components are hundreds and thousands of times what consumer grade components cost, plus the satellites sometimes have stealth technologies, boosters, and extremely expensive cameras and other sensors.
The KickSat hardware was consumer grade, which was most of the reason for the low cost, the lack of sufficiently radiation hardened components also was the reason it malfunctioned according to their update.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NROL-32b_ULA_21NOV201... carrying one large satellite