[Server-sky] Cubesat funding and flight opportunities

[Michael Turner]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 12:35 AM, Charles Radley <cfrjlr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I know of funding and flight opportunities for Cubesat class missions to
> LEO, if y'all can think of a flight experiment which would fit   into
> that form factor.

What does it take to qualify? And what LEO orbits are these?

I think of Sprites as the closest thing to Server Sky thinsats
currently available. Several hundred of these are scheduled to go up
in December on ELaNa 5 / CRS-3, as part of a KickStarter-funded
cubesat mission, KickSat.

Admittedly, Sprites, being SMT PC boards, are still orders of
magnitude thicker than true thinsats as Keith envisions thems. I don't
think the significance of the KickSat mission for Server Sky is
entirely negligible however -- when Keith speaks of a constellation or
cloud of tiny satellites capable of computation, storage and ground
communications, a successful KickSat mission would give him an answer
to skeptics who object, "But has anyone done anything remotely like
this yet?" And that success might be only six months away now.

According to KickSat lead Zac Manchester, who I chatted with in
Mountain View a few days ago, Mason Peck (the conceptual champion of
ChipSats and Zac's PhD advisor) will be finishing out his term as NASA
Chief Technologist at the end of this year. Then it's back to Cornell
for him, where he can presumably pick up various research threads he
can't really focus on right now -- ChipSats included. By then, KickSat
might have launched and succeeded. (Zac thinks launch will be further
delayed; on the other hand, he thinks his chances of success are
higher than average for Cubesat missions, which fail about 50% of the
time.)

Server Sky could gain dramatically in credibility with an advocate
like Peck, and a KickSat mission accomplished. There are ChipSat-like
concepts floating around at JPL as well. There must be others who are
toying with chipsat-scale concepts.  I think the ticket is to ask
/those/ people what they would like to see in a cubesat form factor,
select some experiment from among them, brand the project Server Sky,
and crowdfund a cubesat mission for it. It's not too soon to start
getting some hooks in the water.

Regards,
Michael Turner

Project Persephone
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Tel: +81 (3) 6890-1140
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turner at projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry



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