Record-Breaking Amateur Rocket Launch | Hacker News Reader

Record-Breaking Amateur Rocket Launch

popularmechanics.com

58 pointsrobg16 comments

An acquaintance of mine is building a rocket of roughly the same size. But with two important differences:

1) It will go into space (defined as 100 kilometers above the surface of the Earth)

2) He will be aboard

He recently finished building the worldst largest amateur submarine, so I think there's a pretty good chance he's going to pull it off. They plan to launch from a barge in the North Sea, and have apparently just gotten the official go-ahead from various agencies. The boosters will run on pure oxygen and epoxy, and they have had multiple successful booster tests.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

That is just plain awesome. This is the type of Hacker/Tweaker/Discoverer attitude that makes me smile from ear to ear.

Interestingly he is doing it all basically without any money, just a lot of smart and dedicated people. He also says that his biggest problem isn't technical, it's getting all the official licenses, approvals and documents in order. The government doesn't really know what to do when some guy calls up and asks if it's OK that he fires himself into space from a home-made rocket.

Surely it's not too different from what Scaled Composites had to do when they built/launched SpaceShipOne. (Yes, stationary launch is different from air-launched, but the regulatory approvals as I understand them have to do with space, not ground launch.)

That of course doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ass...

They are currenly thinking about using the submarine to tow the barge with the rocket from Copenhagen to the North Sea, and just getting that journey approved is a huge problem. The department of defense seems to have a negative opinion about a submarine towing a huge rocket through Danish territorial waters :-)

There are many obstacles like that.

Note that in this case the group is launching from Denmark, so approvals and regulations are different than what Scaled Composites (a US company) had to go through.

Mewonders what's going to happen as people start calling about space insurance programs. Still a long shot, but probably faster than the government can finish scratching its head.

Hopefully they will fare better than Rocket Guy: http://ask.metafilter.com/72873/What-happened-to-Brian-Walke...

He was planning a H2O2-based suborbital launch. Guess he chickened out.

I was there at the launch!

Some of the ingenuity that went into building a model rocket of this size is remarkable. Talking to some of the folks involved afterwards, it turns out that the mechanism to separate the rocket into two parts at apogee was built from car seatbelt tighteners and an airbag.

It was heartening to see how many people showed up -- easily a thousand or more.

I submitted another article about the same rocket a week ago, if anyone is interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571971

The space elevator can probably use some amateur innovatordom, although I don't know how if at all that is possible. I have the impression that no matter how good the amateurs get, boosters will always be a colossal waste of fuel. Cool factor 1, space advancement factor 0.

This is a bit off topic but I always thought the easiest way to build a space elevator was from space lowering it down to the planet. Not building it ground up.

That being said I'm all about more amateur involvement and less regulations. Or to say it another way, regulations should not be the limiting factor like it is today.

I think it's the only way to make them. You start at a geosynchronous orbit and play out a cable towards earth and another as a counterbalance towards outer space. The counterbalance can be used to launch payloads towards the planets.

That probably means amateur involvement in space elevator projects will remain sparse, because it is now mostly a material science / nanoengineering problem. No super-high-speed adrenaline-pumped flying into the sky here.

But once somebody gets up there (and stays up there), different story :D

Alas it looks like a far-fetched idea. The hope is that fuel costs don't become prohibitive when it comes around.

That's awesome! I used to launch model rockets in the early 90's at a De Anza College parking lot.

wright brothers 2.0

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