Building a spacecraft

Hey /diy/, I want to build a satellite that orbits around the world. Been thinking about using radio signal and stuff like that to send stuff down. I also wanted to include a camera so my spacecraft can send me the pics to my server. I'd publish the pics and telemetry stuff on my site then. Can anyone please help? I'd really like to do this.

It might be a better idea to inject your own software into an existing satellite. Launching a robot butler into space is expensive and hard to pull off covertly. That being said its probably fun as fuarrrk, and if you do end up doing it I wish you the best of luck.

There is no way to say this without sounding like a prick but... there are corporate and non-profit endeavors you could join to get independent civilian satellites into LEO. If you need to come to an imageboard for advice instead of finding one, I'd say are probably not likely to be successful. Sorry.

http://www.cubesatkit.com http://www.vaspace.org/index.php/thinsat-program these are two kits for hard ware you can design your own payload for both i heard from some guy in a ham radio club that the thinsat costs about 25,000 dollarydoos to launch cubesat is likely more expensive. but schools and clubs do this so it might be feasable p.s. id like to be involved in this i have some skills in electronics and i have a technicians class license in amature radio hq27m@slipry.net

>>763 Thanks but to be honest I wanted to build my own one, but If I fail I'll look into it. I hope I won't tho, I really want to do this. >>764 its fine, I just wanted to see what lainanons had to say because people here are very knowledgable. see 765 >>765 Thanks for sharing the urls, I'll look into it. btw I email'd you

>>765 >>766 Cubesat launches are around $50,000 on the low end for a 1U. Schools and clubs usually get discounted launches through ride-sharing programs - you'd have to pay for your deployer too on a private launch. Another note is that all the LEO cubesat launches are designed to decay pretty quickly to reduce orbital debris - lifetime is usually a maximum of about one year.

>>762 OP, have you thought about joing a research lab and working with a team? Tell me a bit about your education.

my brother's doing this with a team at his university. apparently the cubesat they're using is $20k+ and they're paying for it with a NASA grant. i think as part of that grant they'll also get to tag along on some underweighted rocket. joining a university project is really the only feasible way to do this. even if you're rich, it's probably not worth paying for out of pocket (afaik small satellites in LEO typically only last about a year before the orbit decays and they break up.. at least that's the figure my brother gave me for his).

I guess my school launched a few of these before. Some things I picked up on (I wasn't part of the project): It was fuarrrking expensive, around $50k. They launched it on a NASA spaceship with cubesats from other schools Our school was the only one on that rocket that survived because of the radiation-hardened code and dual-processor model. If you want something to be in space, it needs to be able to live through some serious cosmic phenomenea. All I can say is good luck. You'll need a powerful sattelite to communicate with it and it will probably cost a lot. Launching a sattelite isn't like rocket science, it is rocket science.

>>773 Thanks, I'll try >>772 I can look into that but I was thinking about asking people in my hackerspace, I'm not rich so I can't just pay 50k for something like that >>771 Going to 9th grade in germany.

>>774 If you're a school student you could probably get a slot on a JP Aerospace PongSat launch - not orbital, but free and gets you a fair bit of experience for radiation/vacuum resistant electronics.

I propose putting a piratebox or a meshnet into space as the first step towards conquering the galaxy in the name of Empress Of Mankind Lain.

>>778 Sounds good, I'll look into it. thanks! >>780 haha

>>780 Always thought a proper text BBS constellation would be a good idea! There's a couple of Amateur APRS/Ax.25 satellites, but all the big AMSAT ones are slowly dying out and there's not much in the way of funds to replace them. There's even a digipeater on the ISS (ARISS)! http://www.ariss.net/index.cgi?absolute=1 I'd guess the bigger challenges would be adequate radiation-resistant storage, and the ground-station hardware given that SDRs that can transmit are still pretty expensive. Wonder if you could get away with putting it in an ISM band so it's license-free, too?

Consider checking the little tiny Sprite satellites that Kicksat launched some time ago. Open source and info about ground stations is freely available. http://kicksat.github.io/ Not powerful by any means but an interesting project and a good place to start if you don't want to use an available satellite as a reflector.