Hackers said to be planning to Launch Satellites to Combat Censorship
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The key issue with getting anything to orbit is the fuel cost. It's expensive, and pretty much impossible to avoid. Micro satellites work by weighing very little and fitting in spaces on the rocket that otherwise would be empty. There's still a fuel cost in doing that (Most chemical rockets have a cost to orbit of at least $10,000 / kg). It's unavoidable. The existing micro satellites (ie AmSats) have been launched on the generosity of the launching organisation (unlikely to happen with satellites designed to circumvent governments) and have a very high failure rate.
It's not impossible, but the project would need serious backing. Even more expensive than paying the cost of launching micro satellites would be actually developing their own launch platform (another suggestion in the article).
Hobbyists have sent balloons to "space" at 100,000 feet <http://www.brooklynspaceprogram.org/>; though that obviously isn't going to get you into orbit.
Groups like CU Spaceflight are experimenting with launching rockets from high-altitude balloons. The idea is that the balloon will get you through most of the atmosphere for dirt cheap, hopefully bringing launch costs down within the reach of private citizens.
A project like that could put a satellite in space using a balloon, just not in the way that you're thinking of. :-)
No. What could work, with regard to a space station, is to send up thousands of robotic panels, and insert them into orbit at roughly the same spot. They would communicate with each other to figure out where they are in relation to one another, and then they would, one pair at a time, fire their own thrusters to come together, and permanently join with each other, to form not only the space station itself, but also the station's distributed computing system and sensor network. The robots might even go further, by generating an atmosphere, thus allowing for the station to be occupied by humans. We already have the ability to easily send up such robots, by using Orbital's Pegasus, which is launched by a modified L-1011 from 40,000 feet. All we really need is to design, build and test the robots, such that each is no more than 1,000 pounds, as well as scale up the process of building and launching those rockets, which is covered below, in an article by John Walker, co-author of AutoCAD.
http://www.orbital.com/spacelaunch/pegasus
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html (A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away)
If you didn't burn fuel to match speeds, you'd smack into the robot, which will be moving at orbital velocity.
See, the way a satellite stays "up" is by moving really fast in a straight line perpendicular to the earth's surface, like this:
satellite earth
^-> falls "down"
| /
| |
d-0-b |
|
\
Anyone wants to do the math? I'm a bit rusty.
I've come to think there are many ways to reach orbit with our current levels of technology but it's just too expensive to do the R&D.
* I actually got suck on figuring out the helium required because everytime you add more helium it adds more weight which requires more helium and so on. It must need some kind of complex differential equation.
It's probably impossible with current propulsion technology, but it would be useful to have a number when it starts to be possible.
A balloon could present a method of getting a lightweight rocket to a very high altitude before engine firing, reducing the drag on the rocket and allowing the rocket engine to be designed just for the very low air pressure environment at those heights (rather than the compromise that modern ground-launched rockets have to make), but the size of the payload would be limited by the balloon size (with approximately 1kg/m^3 of helium, you'd need a lot of helium to lift a rocket of any size).
As for those asking about the feasibility, the HAM radio crew have had their own satellites for years: http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/index.php
Also check out these hackers who want to go to the moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmgzrDCrP30
The only way to stop things like SOPA (legislation) is to stop the people that support such legislation. Unfortunately, such a matter will require far greater innovation considering the scope of corruption in politics. By corruption I refer simply to the adage "money is power".
At the moment it sounds as though no single country's legislation would be able to stop this, but perhaps countries could prevent users from connecting to it.
The other part is that the act of launching the satellites is likely outside of the law in most countries, at least without some form of permission.
*: one can argue that it is appropriate to use the term 'regime' when government no longer reflects the foundational constitutional principles of the nation.
Nations have become increasingly conscientious about this problem after a couple of incidents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#Debris_from_and_as...
Must be a way to ruin the solar panels with a laser or similar. I assume non-state actors won't be able to launch satellites that use a nuclear energy source?
So presumably the US is smart enough not to mess with such groups (even if they don't actually have nuclear weapons they would still be able to do great damage with conventional explosions or even a piece of rock).
If I declare that tomorrow I'm going to launch a satellite, without going through official channels, I go to jail.
If I don't announce it beforehand and just launch, then I'd better hope I don't start a nuclear war.
Unless this goes through official channels, it becomes a ballistic missile proliferation issue, which the powers that be are somewhat twitchy about.
Pretty stupid, I know, but probably one of those things that worked "well enough" until technology made it seem absurd.
I remember this came up because people were getting served process on airplanes, even if they never landed in the country/state beneath them at that moment.
"A space ownership issue of current practical importance is the allocation of slots for satellites in geostationary orbit. This is managed by the International Telecommunication Union. The 1976 Declaration of the First Meeting of Equatorial Countries, also known as the Bogotá Declaration, signed by several countries located on the Earth's equator, attempted to assert sovereignty over those portions of the geosynchronous orbit that continuously lie over the signatory nation's territory. These claims did not receive international support or recognition and were subsequently largely abandoned." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_real_estate
The reason for this, by the way, dates back to a bit of cold war strategising which pre-dated even Sputnik. Both the Americans and Soviets decided that it was more important to be able to know what the other was doing than to extend their territorial claims up to orbit. This helped to keep the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction in a relatively static lock; otherwise it would have been far mor dynamic and dangerous. Therefore the US did not protest when Sputnik flew overhead, and the USSR did not object to American satellites; in 1967 this was formalised by the Outer Space Treaty:
Other factors: the space might not be owned by anyone but the satilites might be. Sure the US government in us courts for damages. Get an injunction ruok prevent them doing it again.
As for the satellites being owned by someone, how do you assert ownership on something that exists where there are absolutely no laws?
As far as I know NASA/US Government claims ownership of US satilites, so the precedent has already been set.
Whack-a-launcher is way easier than whack-a-satellite.
Seems like a better solution would be strengthening the protocols, figuring out mesh networking solutions, rather that chucking cisco routers into space.
However assaulting something that is presently in space is really difficult and it is likely that physical violence would do no good at all.
The two types of feasibility that become important when you lose that backing:
Cost: can it be done cheaply enough?
Legal: not so much when the satellite is up, but the act of getting it up, and the act of communicating with it from the ground.
It can take up a couple of years to get a frequency allocation for your satellite to communicate on.
Amateur HAM radio satellites operate under fairly strict rules that could be revoked by the powers that be at any time.
There are few technological artifacts more vulnerable than a satellite.
If they want my domain orbit8.com, it's theirs.