Craig the Rocket Scientist Looks at Project Icarus.
Typically I focus on all the cool stuff that NASA and other big companies are doing, LCROSS, Moon Landings, Ares 1-X, all sorts of cutting edge stuff. But what about the other end of the spectrum? There are plenty of cool backyard, do it yourself projects going on out there. Let me take the time to highlight one of them:
Sub-orbital for under $200
For every person out there sending up weather balloons to get their own reality show, there’s an Oliver Yeh and a Justin Lee.
Lee and Yeh, who are continually coming up with crazy ideas, decided to try and take some pictures of the earth from space. Not being astronauts or NASA engineers, they needed to get a little bit creative. Thus was born Project Icarus:
| $50 Weather Balloon: | Check |
| $40 Camera: | Check |
| $50 Pre Paid Cell Phone: | Check |
| $3 Parachute: | Check |
Amazing Sub-orbital pictures? Checkmate.
Head on over to their website dedicated to their flight and to helping others achieve the same feat.
The real question is, why aren’t we seeing more of these sorts of things? The Apollo space program was run on less computer power than my calculator. Lift and drag, rocket, and any other physics equation you might need are available in text books or online for free! Not only that, but this is something college kids are able to do in their spare time!
The way I see it, it is either a lack of innovation, or a lack of motivation.
The first option is slightly more palatable than the second, because it means that we would do cool things like Lee and Yeh, but we can’t seem to come up with a cool idea ourselves. However, if that were the case, we would be seeing people launch their cell phone cameras in weather balloons on a daily basis, perhaps we just aren’t motivated enough?
It would be easy to blame pop social culture for a lack of motivation, or perhaps a lazy new generation. Or how about an oppressive older generation and restrictive legislature? It’s easy to come up with excuse for why we aren’t doing amazing things, what we need are reasons to do amazing things.
The President would like to restructure NASA, to focus on developing technologies, and I’m fine with that. While we are at it, I think we should have our new NASA set aside some prize money for small competitions for the rest of us non-genius or non-rich people to compete for.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never put my cell phone in orbit either. But I think I know how I’m going to spend my weekend!
January 14th, 2011 at 9:40 pm
[...] Aerospace Engineer’s first appearance on our list comes courtesy of his March 18th article, Craig the Rocket Scientist Looks at Project Icarus, his piece on the backyard project from two friends who managed to take amazing suborbital pictures [...]
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