Copenhagen Suborbitals: The world’s only manned, amateur space program | Hacker News Reader

Copenhagen Suborbitals: The world’s only manned, amateur space program

copenhagensuborbitals.com

192 pointswalterbell70 comments

The most recent launch was August 2018, https://copenhagensuborbitals.com/missions/nexo-ii/

> The Nexø rocket class is a technology demonstrator in advance of building the significantly bigger Spica rocket that will take our astronaut to space ... The rocket flew in a perfect line up to app. 6500 m, where the nosecone was discarded, and the ballute did its job: Stabilising the rocket, and then deploying the main parachute that carried the rocket down to a gentle splashdown in the sea. The rocket was quickly recovered as planned – and even the nosecone was found. This splash cannot be underestimated: It was the first time we had a rocket land in a parachute, and that with a speed so low that an astronaut would have survived the impact. Also, the DPR system proved to be as successful as we hoped. This system, that uses a helium tank to maintain a constant pressure in the fuel og oxidizer tanks, paves the way for a rocket that can fly an astronaut all the way to space without the need for extremely complicated turbopumps. In other words: The Nexø I and II has done their job as concept demonstrators for the systems that now can be scaled up to the much bigger, manrated Spica rocket class.

I was tangentially involved in the Nexo II launch. Alexandru Csete (author of Gqrx) used my GNU Radio DVB-S2 transmitter code to send live HD video from the rocket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwSYv8eVQqQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYF8Am-lt20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqwJu6cSBW4

Ron, both of you are famous in free software and amateur radio communities due to your work, so thanks again.

I have some doubts though regarding the safety of manned launches here. Seems like a serious issue to me and I hope it's not treated lightly.

>I have some doubts though regarding the safety of manned launches here.

I have some doubts about the safety of climbing mount Everest too. That doesn't mean people shouldn't do it. People like to do risky stuff.

I had doubt on manned amateur launch too, it is quite likely that the safety requirement would not be as strict as NASA due to funding issue.

Nevertheless, space flight requires bravery, some people might be willing to risk their life on the rockets, cant blame them, space is too much to explore.

My impression from afar is that they are far from strapping themselves inside a rocket, no matter what, like that flat earth guy. The manned part seems to be more like an aspirational goal than a fixture that will push all compromise elsewhere.

Surely people used to convey similar objections about sailing uncharted waters. Exploration is by nature a dangerous gig, everyone involved is completely aware of the risks they are taking.

Cool project, but I always find it amusing when the word “suborbital” is used since it’s sort of a fancy way to say normal or not space. Reminds me this Feynman story:

> Or his questioning of space shuttle engineers: ''They kept referring to the problem by some complicated name - a 'pressure-induced vorticity oscillatory wa-wa,' or something. I said, 'Oh, you mean a whistle!' 'Yes,' they said; 'it exhibits the characteristics of a whistle.' ''

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/feynman-do...

I find the term is apt here, because 'space' is roughly defined as anything beyond 100km from Earth's surface (which they're aiming for). But reaching space is vastly easier than reaching orbit, which requires reaching a speed of about 28000km/h or 17000 mph, which they're definitely not aiming for!

That makes sense, I think I still think of an object reaching space as it can then stay there, vs just a peekaboo. :)

Suborbital denotes trajectories that do leave the atmosphere, but never complete a full orbit. Even though they have not yet achieved that yet, it seems appropriate name imho. And eventually they'll have to change their name to Copenhagen Orbitals I guess ;-)

They also seem to be taking some liberties when using the term "manned". But yeah, cool project.

Hmm? The goal is to stick a person at the top of it. That's pretty much the definition of manned as far as I'm aware.

"Copenhagen Suborbitals is the world’s only manned, amateur space program."

The way this is phrased, it sounds like they've already achieved it, and I feel like that's a little bit intentional. They could have easily called it an "amateur manned space program", which would have lessened the ambiguity.

They are writing in a second (or third+) language.

People learning English have to learn adjective order — it's a big, red bus; not a red, big bus – which could have contributed.

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/commas-w...

I'm pretty sure it is "big red bus"[0] and not "big, red bus" unless you're using the comma for emphasis? Either way, as you say, it can't be "red, big bus" nor can it be "red big bus" because these adjectives are cumulative, not coordinating.

[0] https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/commas-w...

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/abo...

I think that comma was correct. Try saying it (the whole sentence I mean, not just "big red bus". He wasn't an adjective phrase describing the bus but an example of a list of adjectives that could form an adjective phrase. You instinctively put pauses between "big" and "red" because you are talking about it as a list. When you are talking about lists you put commas between the elements, and when you take pauses you put commas. So there are at least two reasons why a comma belongs there even though when using adjectives naturally you don't put a comma.

Writing it that way makes it sound like they've already achieved the goal, that they're already putting humans into space.

Like, if just having it as a goal is sufficient, well heck, I could step onto my lawn tomorrow and declare my household a manned amateur space program.

Which would be just fine and acceptable, as long as you declared feasible plans for removing your entire lot from the ground and off to space :)

He doesn't need to move the lot to space. Just use it to move a human to space...

Either way I don't imagine his neighbors will be happy.

I'm curious how a volunteer organization will achieve the culture and technical maturity to make human rated hardware without a high probability of a horrible death. Think about all the conditions in a long chain of events that must all go right, in a launch, to avoid cooking, freezing, squishing, cratering, asphyxiating, poisoning, exploding, or drowning your crew.

After decades of practice, NASA ended up under 1:100 odds of mishap at the end of the Shuttle program, with some estimates at 1:25. It would be fair to say all space programs need to go through a learning period where you blow a lot of things up and discover all the failure modes. SpaceX ate through several billion dollars on this path, before dialing in their launcher reliability, and they still don't think they're ready for humans.

How will CS do all this learning and get everything right?

Maybe that's not their primary goal? People have taken horrifying risks to push frontiers throughout history. The Oregon Trail claimed an estimated 21,000 lives.* Perhaps they are willing to accept a higher risk of death?

*Though, despite the horrific toll, the final odds of death on the O.T., once the dust had settled, were about 5% to NASA's ~4%.

I don't see why a volunteer organization should be held at the same standards that a tax funded agency -wrongfully imo- is. They can do whatever they want with their lives.

It should be noted that, being strictly suborbital, both the challenges and risks are orders of magnitude lower than even a launch to LEO, and that unlike many space programs, they have quite a bit of prior history and information to draw on. I don't know whether this will be enough to reduce risk to near-NASA levels, however.

I am curious as to whether those odds cited are of partial successes, safely-aborted launches, or fatal failures.

Indeed, and things like micro controllers and materials have come a long way since the 60ties..

It's by no means cheap or trivial, but a lot of technology have been democratized since the 60ties..

Climbing the Everest has a 1:10 chance of death, yet many people try their luck every year. It's the same thing.

Fair, although I feel like with Everest, the fact that it's so risky is part of the point. Like, if hiking up Everest was perfectly safe, would people still treat it as some huge accomplishment?

I feel like you’re implying things are different with space flight, but I feel like they’re the same, no?

I think Copenhagen Subobital might agree with you :)

> When Edmund Hillary was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest he replied: “Because it’s there”.

https://copenhagensuborbitals.com/about-us/

And yet everyday you (and everyone else) get in a car with much higher risk of death.

Why the double standard for experimental space fight?

Do you really think car travel has a 1/100 chance of death, or is this a whoosh moment for me?

They've got their statistics confused.

Lifetime odds (in US) of death due to vehicle accident is 1/102. (https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...)

But that's average lifetime odds, not mortality rate per journey. It's a statistic with a very different meaning. But I see how people get confused by all the different ways risk can be expressed.

I do not think a trip in a car is that dangerous, but I recently ran across an article that suggested going to the hospital has approximately a 1/140 chance of death due to medical error, for what that's worth. That's per visit, not per lifetime.

"based on a total of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths stemmed from a medical error, which the researchers say now translates to 9.5 percent of all deaths each year in the U.S"

https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-...

I wish them best of luck, but am more optimistic about Paul Allen's Stratolaunch system: https://www.stratolaunch.com/2018/08/20/stratolaunch-announc... They hope to orbit a 370kg payload in 2020.

That mass seems almost sufficient to send up a human.

Could we build a 300kg capsule to carry a 70kg human payload, a few hours of air and power, parachute, heatshield, and enough thrust to de-orbit (with less than 5-7G of acceleration)?

Stratolaunch is using a Pegasus rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket), which is obviously not rated for human spaceflight, but rich "explorers" might be interested.

Stratolaunch is far away from anything human related. There are a couple competitors who want to lift a couple 100kg to LEO by 2020.

They have not even built their own rocket yet and so far their efforts in that direction have not impressed progressed fast. It will be 10+ years before the launch a human, if ever. Given the existing competition, I don't think they will ever get there.

Outside of BlueOrigin and maybe Virgin Galactic are close to human suborbital flight.

Is it open-source? As that could speed up development in the area.

Why aren't we all doing this! Isn't this the dream of everyone who ever built a model rocket?

Feasibility is the major contributing factor. Time, Space and Money are hard to come by. Then of course there is the red tape from the respective government involving permission for a very costly hobby. Then, the easiest to acquire, knowledge.

These people launch from international waters. They are a pirate space organisation!

A pirate space organisation that gets the air space over them closed by the government.

Air space over international waters can be controlled by a government?

"We fly our rockets from the military firing practice area ES D 139 in the Baltic Sea, 20 km east of of the Danish island of Bornholm. It spans 70×35 km, and are opened to us by the Royal Danish Navy for the launch time window. The Danish and Swedish authorities are very helpful, and close the airspace above for airtraffic in the hours of the actual launch."

https://copenhagensuborbitals.com/about-us/

There is this quote: "If all of your money is not get wasted to your hobby, your hobby sucks."

Updated: "...and won't require closing air space..."

Maybe the military just informed airlines that they are doing tests in that area?

(I have no idea how air traffic control works)

Also regulation I’m not entirely sure how many countries would let you build what amounts to at least an intermediate range ballistic missile in the back yard.

I’m actually wondering how did they get by with the multiple missile technology non proliferation treaties out there.

The majority of ITAR restrictions (and other similar export laws, in my experience) are for technologies that help with navigation and targetting, not propulsion. The technology to build an amateur rocket is a lot more widespread and easier to build locally or import.

Besides, export restrictions are rarely absolute - they mostly just add paperwork to legally certify that neither you nor your clients are sending the technology in question to Iran or NK.

ITAR restricts rocket engine engines above a certain specific impulse: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1

Try building an ICBM in your back yard and wait to see how long it will take for some government agency to come knocking.

And you don’t need to import it, making these publicly and not to mention possibly opening the plans to the public will trigger some alarms some where.

Even if you take national security concerns out of the equation there are a lot of other safety concerns that would get someone interested.

I personally would prefer that my naighbour won’t be assembling a liquid fueled rocket in their garage :)

They can probably use volunteers.

These guys are super amazing! I worry that they will run up against the MTCR[1] in their next step between their unmanned and manned version, since driving out to international waters is 'exporting' as is flying above 100km :-) It would be awesome if the Danish government would come out and publicly sanction their efforts to cut off that potential mess.

[1] https://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/missile-techn...

Their website states that they launch from a Danish Naval base and they receive help from Danish and Swedish authorities, so hopefully that means the Danish government could be open to helping out with the MTCR too.

https://copenhagensuborbitals.com/about-us/

This is awesome! I hope they get a nice bump in membership numbers after being featured on HN.

Does anyone know if there a way to get more involved in the project (eg as a volunteer of any kind)? I couldn't find anything on the website.

They are very open. You can basically just show up in their hangar and have a chat with whoever is around at the time. At least it used to be like this, I haven't been out there for some years.

CS are already very well known in Denmark. Everybody with any sort of engineering or science interest here knows about them.

What actually makes them amateur at this point? Wouldn’t it behiove them to incorporate as a non profit perhaps?

They kinda are a non-profit. They are, AFAIK, a _forening_ (translates to association), which allow them to collectively own assets and collect donations.

> What actually makes them amateur at this point?

That they're hobbyists doing this in their free time? It says:

> We’re an association of 50-60 unpaid, volunteering members and we build our rockets in a workshop in Copenhagen, Denmark. That requires many different skills, so we’re a very diverse group, from blacksmiths to rocket scientist. We all do this in our spare time, working regular day jobs on the side.

Something tells me that the space program is on hiatus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Madsen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kim_Wall

To be clear, Peter Madsen has nothing to do with Copenhagen Suborbitals, and hasn't had for quite a while.

He seems to have left the project four years ago. I suspect the murder might have an impact on the public relations side of things, but I'm also pretty sure people who do donate to them do their research better.

Correct!

For those interested (and can live with Google Translate) they have a very active and informative blog on:

https://ing.dk/blogs/rumfart-pa-den-anden-made

what about the african space program?

One of the founders of Copenhagen Suborbitals are the now infamous Peter Madsen

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/07/copenhagen-ki...

It should be noted that he left the project in 2014.

They are not averse to some creative editing in order to dissociate themselves, though. On the 2011 launch: "Preparations were overseen by Flight Director Kristian von Bengtson from his station on MHV903 Hjortø and coordinated with Pad Lead Niels Foldager on Sputnik". Which is true, but they were equally overseen - and on the same vessel - by Peter Madsen, whom they deftly fail to mention.

I was a supporter at the time, but soon left, very much on account of Madsen. I must admit that his later exploits in retrospect quite irrationally have tainted the entire project for me, and I'm not going back.

Aye, sure, he might be a murderer.

But is there any evidence to suggest his murderous behavior makes him a poor engineer?

I do agree that it is good he left the project long ago, though.

Same thing happened to Hans Reiser; ReiserFS was at one point pretty popular among Linux users, and would probably still be if he hadn't murdered his wife.

Just curious: what's the purpose of your post ?

An example of entrepreneurial accomplishment. Peter Madsen desperately wanted to go to space. So far he has made it to confined space.

Allow me: Negativity

It's an incredible story. One of the co-founders went on to build his own submarine, then brought a Swedish journalist along for a voyage on which he murdered and dismembered her. Or should we all just pretend it never happened?

Hmmm. I think I might have to join this.

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