If you look at the cut open V2 rocket in the Imperial War museum in London you can see about 1/3 of the innards is the control system; gyro's, inertial guidance etc. Today you can buy that on a chips from digi-key, farnell, sparkfun or wherever for say $50 or even just root your smartphone and use it as the control system. It always surprises me that there is very little precision rocketry or ROV proliferation amongst the countries and political/religious movements with extreme agendas out there.
Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
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Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#12I don't have anywhere near the smarts to pull something like this off (maybe one day, one day), but I'm always so excited when people try these and they work.
Awesome job
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#13Watch the video! It's one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile.
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#14I read that as "dude sends epic homegrown into space." I pictured an enormous plant in a hydroponics research facility, with growth unfettered by gravity...
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#15I don't have anywhere near the smarts to pull something like this off (maybe one day, one day), but I'm always so excited when people try these and they work. Awesome job
Build something else. Whatever it is that you build you end up with that awesome "I built that" feeling. Last night I hacked to 0230 on turning a set of 50 GE Color Effects Christmas lights into a 7x7 color display. No one around me really understands why this was worth staying up half the night for, but when I finally got control of the serial bus protocol for programming the lights and saw my display work under my control it was awesome.
What they looked like before I started hacking them: http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11630618
Short video of the first full glitch free run of the lights under my control: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9SOI9EnjTg
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#16"As the GPS devices on Qu8k failed to log readings above 100,000 feet, the attempt is likely disqualified." would love to know what happened
I thought commercial GPS was disabled above 60,000 ft.
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#17Sending your own widget up and having it bring back snapshots of other continents and a round Earth, only seconds later. What an amazing feeling it must be. Makes me wanna go dig up my old mechanics book. Can someone give a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to build something like this and how long it took them?
You could cheaply reach the same altitude using a helium balloon. 121,000 ft is only 37km. Plenty of home grown helium balloons have reached that height (and higher). My project reached 32km: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html
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Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#18Can't they confirm that the altitude met the contest minimum based on how much earth curvature there is in the photos?
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could cheaply reach the same altitude using a helium balloon. 121,000 ft is only 37km. Plenty of home grown helium balloons have reached that height (and higher). My project reached 32km: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html
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$200 to $300 depending on how much you scrounge from people. I spent more because I decided to do my radio ham qualification in parallel and buy some gear for that.
Most of the gear I used in the capsule was cheap (camera from eBay, Arduino, strip board, polystyrene box). Paid real money for the balloon, parachute and helium.
EDIT: As the parent comment was deleted: this was in reply to a question asking about the approximate cost of something like GAGA-1.
Re: Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
#20Pretty impressive, but that ain't space.