Thanks for the find
I personally think this is really cool.
Heres a link to the actual website:
www.interorbital.com...
THE GIST
A company is selling kits to build and fly small satellites for $8,000.
Interorbital Systems has planned a test flight of its Neptune rocket in August.
Customers include hobbyists, universities and government research labs.
Most TubeSat customers, so far, are universities, including the Naval Postgraduate School in California, Morehead State University in Kentucky, and the University of Sydney in Australia. A private high school has signed up and so has the United Kingdom's Defense, Science and Technology Laboratory.
The customers include hobbyists like Alex Antunes, who is customizing his TubeSat into a device that can detect changes in the ionosphere in a digital format for musicians' use

Could you imagine during the oil spill if we could have had our own satellite images of the area? Originally posted by JohnPhoenix
As cheap as this is, I wonder how they are going to solve the problems of having thousands and thousands of new satellites in orbit and coordinate them from getting in the way of other satellites.
What about craft integrity? It's a kit?.. like a do it yourself hobby rocket?
If so, won't most of these things become space junk because they will fall apart?
The late Dr Forward -- a renowned physicist who worked in the United States and from his second home in Scotland -- believed it was possible to use 'displaced orbits' to deploy more satellites to the north or south of the Earth's equator, helping to meet the growing demand for communications.
He proposed that the orbit of a geostationary satellite could be pushed above -- or below -- the usual geostationary ring around the Earth, which follows the line of the equator, by using a large solar sail propelled by the pressure of sunlight. However, critics later claimed that such 'displaced orbits' were impossible due to the unusual dynamics of the problem.



As cheap as this is, I wonder how they are going to solve the problems of having thousands and thousands of new satellites in orbit and coordinate them from getting in the way of other satellites.







Thanks for the link Zombie much appreciated. Like I said, my first thread thank you for making it better

And, best of all, the price of the TubeSat kit actually includes the price of a launch into Low-Earth-Orbit on an IOS NEPTUNE 30 launch vehicle. Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth's surface, they do not contribute to the long-term build-up of orbital debris.
