Kicksat burned up, including Sprites | Hacker News Reader

Kicksat burned up, including Sprites

kickstarter.com

83 pointsjmpe31 comments

Unfortunate turn of events - the on-board computer reset after launch (probably due to radiation) and with it the timer for releasing the sprite femtosatellites, and the radio receiver didn't work due to insufficient supply voltage, so the sprites couldn't be released manually either.

Were the components radiation-hardened, or did they just wing it?

Aerospace grade radiation hardened computers start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per CPU and with a cost equal to or greater (usually the latter) than the launch cost, they just aren't worth it for CubeSats that aren't carrying critical payloads (piggy back launches are $200-500k depending on institution affiliation).

A little shielding is enough to protect the CPU from permanent damage for a while and error correction circuits using 3-7 or more CPUs running in parallel is way cheaper, even including engineering costs, than a single CPU.

Even with the troubles, one hell of a success for $70,000.

start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per CPU

Not really, depending on the performance you want:

http://www.intersil.com/en/products/space-and-harsh-environm...

It's a little over $100, which isn't all that much when you consider that this is a CPU that has been used successfully in space before by NASA.

(I remember a short while ago on an electronics forum there was a discussion about either this or a similar project - can't remember - where someone bet that they were certainly going to fail because they weren't using rad-hard parts. This data point certainly supports that.)

Yes, that chip was used on the Galileo satellite but the Silicon-on-Sapphire version that NASA used for that mission is significantly more expensive. The $100 version has error correction built in but it's only rad hardening is any packaging and specs (low power + slow clock speed). A current generation rad hardened CPU comparable to the SOS version in the Galileo would be the RAD750 [1]. Several Arduinos in a lead box would be roughly equivalent to the consumer RCA 1802 chips.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

I wonder how much of that is inherent manufacturing cost vs. low volumes recovering R&D.

Also, any compliance issues around rad hard components (they're also used in nuclear weapons, and fairly restricted as a result)

I don't have exact numbers but from my limited experience I would say about 30% of the price is the cost of setup and production (human labor, materials, capital depreciation) and the rest of the price minus profit is administrative, sales, and regulatory cost. Silicon design is getting cheaper, especially with FPGAs, and the designs are relatively flexible while the sheer amount of time required to set up a manufacturing line to produce even a single processor is very expensive. Like the RCA 1802 linked above, a single silicon design can be used for decades in mission critical applications as the revenue piles up and the costs to tweak the design fall. When you're the only one buying a setup for a rad hardened manufacturing process and producing only a dozen chips for your client, slipping in several experimental revisions on the mask can sometimes be almost free.

Most compliance issues are barriers to entry but are largely overblown. In fields like aerospace and nuclear weapons the most critical requirement is abundant reliability and lifetime data which is why, regulation or no, you will never put something like an Intel 60nm or lower processor into a critical $100 million satellite.

I'm mostly wondering if there could be a business case (or hobby project) to make medium volumes of non custom rad hard chips for cost constrained aerospace projects.

Has no one learned from the Fantastic Four's rocket trip?

Downvoted? I thought that was funny. Sad turn of events for KickSat, but you have to laugh somehow. This is the first I heard of the project. I'll be watching for and hopefully backing KickSat2.

This is why NASA spends millions, not tens of thousands, of dollars to send things to space.

Of course, it will cost "only" tens of thousands of dollars to make a second try after getting real-life experience from the first one...

No NASA Spends Billions. Cost does not equal value when you're going to space, SpaceX proves that.

I'm a fan of SpaceX but you're wrong.

SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of what NASA and other space agencies have been doing for decades. Government agencies spent billions of dollars developing space exploration and SpaceX is able to use that knowledge to cut costs and take the next step.

It doesn't need to cost billions of dollars to travel into space anymore.

How many nasa and jpl vets work at spacex these days? Last I heard it was lots.

Someone very acutely pointed put that NASA is less about space exploration and it's more about employment. If you reverse these priorities back, you get SpaceX.

No, NASA spends billions to send laboratories weighing a metric tonne to Mars to send you pretty pictures. Even with insane risk aversion NASA carries out dozens of missions a year and support a lot of critical infrastructure.

I have heard that neuromorphic analog computers do not need to be radiation hardened. Also they are very power efficient. Can more research work on this side bring the cost of onboard control computers down?

Where did you hear that? Inherently any analog system will be more vulnerable to noise. Also, they're not deterministic.

These are in such low orbit that they're still within the Van Allen belts. Vibration during launch rattling something loose is the more likely culprit.

One backer paid $10,000 to be the person who hit the big red button that would launch all the 'sprites' into space... damn.

They can still hit a big red button, I guess.

It really is rocket science. Putting stuff into space is always hard.

Wait, wait ... So they were asking for 30K, got 70K and that let them hitch a ride on a NASA rocket and have a satellite deployed. This seems oddly affordable. What am I missing?

The KickSat was very small, about half the size of a desktop computer.

There are satellites that are bus-sized and have antennas as large as a football field (5-6 tons and 350 foot antennas) floating around up there, those are the billion dollar ones. Their computer components are hundreds and thousands of times what consumer grade components cost, plus the satellites sometimes have stealth technologies, boosters, and extremely expensive cameras and other sensors.

The KickSat hardware was consumer grade, which was most of the reason for the low cost, the lack of sufficiently radiation hardened components also was the reason it malfunctioned according to their update.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NROL-32b_ULA_21NOV201... carrying one large satellite

Awesome project. I think it is pretty imaginative. What about the idea that sending a bunch of rocket payloads up there would add to the space debris already up there though?

"Up there" often doesn't mean a stable orbit.

Ooops. I'm happy PhoneSat worked.

I've not followed this at all but the ARRL was launching satellites decades ago when I was a ham. Whatever happened to all that? (Yeah, I guess I should be Googling.)

There are actually a bunch up there:

http://oscar.dcarr.org

I remember AO-40 when I was first getting into ham radio around the millennium. They experienced quite a slew of problems with that one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AO-40

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