Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

Although it's a bit of an apple to oranges comparison Copenhagen suborbitals are on the trajectory to launching a human into space in around three years time. In a months time they'll have their first testflight from Bornholm in the baltic sea. They're doing this whole thing based on nothing but sponsors and goodwill. Their budget is around $8000 a month - orders of magnitude lower than spacex. They also built the worlds largest homemade submarine btw.

Until now they've developed solid rocket boosters, parachutes, recovery programs, astrouanut survival and cockpit, etc. etc. and have not run into major problems yet.

Some links:

Website: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com

Static test of solid rocket booster (110.000 HP): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g_xjGOJRws&feature=relat...

TEDx talk by Christian Von Bengtson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua9oGxNNGd0

All their technology is open source by the way.

Shameless plug: These guys survive on donations, and a few months ago I helped start a support organization to help them survive economicvally. It's $20 a month to be a member, and we really need more members so we can get these guys into space. If you feel this is a worthy cause and want to join send me an e-mail (it's in my profile). Our website is http://raketvenner.dk/ (currently only in Danish...)

Does Copenhagen Suborbitals reminds anyone a bit of "The Gun Club" in Jules Verne's "From Earth To The Moon"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon)

I've been following Copenhagen suborbitals. It's a great enthusiast club. Their submarine is really neat but is certainly not a commercial submarine, nor are the subs built by Columbian drug runners using similar technology and sophistication.

To say they are 3 years from launching humans into space is very amusing.

There is no chance they will be doing that in 3 years. No chance at all.

Crazy how far a bunch of Goons from Something Awful can go. Kudos to you all and wishes of great success!

Are you guys developing any kind of software?

I am a web developer, so I don't know much about C, but I am sure a lot of people here can help if you put a repository.

We (the support organization) only do financial and moral support :-)

But Copenhagen Suborbitals is pretty software heavy - uplinks, sensors, communications, ballistics, etc. require a lot of software. They're extremely busy right now preparing for the June launch, but I'll try to talk to them whether this would be a good idea. It seems like it to me, although safety might be an issue if you have someone "unknown" developing mission critical stuff.

Thanks for the idea!

"Mission Critical"

Like, literally.

Just a head's up. If there are human lives involved and at risk based on software development, it is incredibly, incredibly important that the software go through the highest possible level of testing, including every possible codepath, every input partition, everything. If it crashes midflight due to a bug, there's about nothing you can do about it. And people will die.

Remember that when you're considering developing mission critical software. It is the most dangerous sort of software to write, and needs aggressively comprehensive testing.

I mean this in the most positive fashion possbile, so please don't take it as just snarky assholism:

It's that kind of thinking that would have prevented most of human achievement in the last few hundred years. If the people signing up to ride this open source rocket into space are aware of the risks, then let them take them. That doesn't mean don't put any care and testing into things, but don't turn into NASA when trying to innovate.

There's a difference between a risk-taking pioneering spirit, and needless stupidity.

There's also a difference between accepting the inherent dangers of primitive spaceflight, and being cavalier with people's lives.

I wouldn't consider the knowledge of proper mission-critical testing to be of any sort mission-critical scenario. You can choose to potentially put your people at risk, but I think those decisions should be left to the actual people who will be going up, and not to a person that wants to arbitrarily contribute to it like an open source project. Small patches can have huge consequences.

How can they afford fuel on 8k per month?

A few reasons:

- They only make liveburns a few times a year.

- They experiment with different cheap fuels. One rocket ran on rubber and actually worked quite well.

- They're quite known around Denmark, so they get unbelievable prices on fuel from companies that want to be associated with the project.

It would be interesting to see what could be accomplished with alternative fuels. Although, the exhaust from something like rubber is probably not so good for the environment? Best of luck to them, thanks for the response.

Do you really think the shuttles solid fuel booster's chemical composition was chosen for it's environmental friendliness?

Depends on the type and the additives. If natural, then it's probably not all that bad if it burns cleanly. Although I'm guessing it's more likely to be synthetic, which puts you into problems. But then even that has to be taken with a grain of salt. Sulphur Dioxide emissions from vulcanized rubber might actually be beneficial to the environment if it's released in the stratosphere.

That is utter nonsense!

There is not the slightest difference between natural and synthetic fuels. Either one can be toxic or not.

And good luck even defining "natural". Crude oil is natural - so I guess it gets a free pass? Uranium is natural too.

I don't think you could pay me enough to climb on top of a solid booster stack (while there is little limit to how much I'd pay to go into space on a properly mature liquid fuel rocket).

You guys should do a kickstarter with each flight. Spondors get their photo taken into space or something.

We've thought about that, but the support organization is only a few months old, so we haven't quite gotten around to it yet.

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