DIY Space: Do You Have Room in Your Life for PocketSpacecraft?

“If at first you don’t succeed…”–this is the spirit that is guiding the people conducting the activities at PocketSpacecraft.com. They originally tried to get their “Mission to the Moon” project funded last year with Kickstarter, but didn’t get the funding level required there. The Mission to the Moon would’ve given lots of people the opportunity to send […]

DIY Space: Balloons and Balls

27,000 were used for re-floating a boat. They’ve been shot at high speeds out of air cannons. Captain Kangaroo enjoyed a daily shower of them. But there’s a person that’s determined to get them into space, too. What is it that’s the object of all this activity? Ping pong balls! The person who’s trying to send […]

Rockzip’s Inflated Dreams

Rockzip Highballoon’s mission “is to improve life on Earth by giving people a new angle from which to solve difficult problems.” How are they proposing to do give people that new angle? By simply launching a “highballoon” about 75,000 ft or a little over 14 miles high. That’s right, this isn’t about satellites, but about balloons that might do […]

How to purchase an affordable small satellite – at the cost of a mid-size car

Because it’s been a year, I’m taking a little break. So you’re currently looking at some of the Clearancejobs.com articles about space I’ve written. I’ll be interspersing these throughout for a little bit (not long). This particular article was posted on Clearancejobs.com on 3 January, 2014. Do you have a spare $35,000 in your pocket? […]

KickSat Kicks the Bucket

According to update #73 on the KickSat Kickstarter page, KickSat is no more. The nanosatellite had experienced a single event upset (SEU) and the Watchdog Timer reset (those terms are explained in this article, here). The result of those two events was a reset of a crucial timer that was supposed to release the smaller […]