ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone

Building a small satellite is quite affordable, but commercial launch costs are a problem. There are several funded kickstarter projects whose goal is to deploy one or more satellites in orbit for much cheaper than what PR is trying to raise.

People also overestimate the difficulty of finding asteroids. Asteroids are still being discovered by amateur astronomers on Earth. It's estimated that there are millions of undiscovered objects. A big space telescope is an advantage but not a requirement.

other kickstarter projects:

  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/880837561/skycube-the-first-satellite-launched-by-you

  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space

  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space

P4 is a little ambitious so it oscillates over the decades between active and shelved. About two cycles ago it led to phase 3 rev D P3D or whatever aka AO-40 which launched a bit more than a decade ago.

As far as kickstarters go, the AO-40 launch would be kinda ambitious, I guess just the launch alone was five million or so. The boost engine blew up, screwing up the orbit and destroying some uplinks/downlinks, then years later further related failures blew out the DC power bus, and that was it.

Now build like 3 of them and launch them and you're almost guaranteed that at least 2 would work... Just bad luck for AO-40.

There has sporadically been talk of a P5 which would be an interplanetary payload.

I've watched this stuff from the outside for a couple decades, being all volunteer its very cat-herding.

One thing I miss (dating myself pretty severely) is the Russian HF band satellites, requiring no fancy hardware on the ground and no ground computer support. I used to listen to RS-10 morse code telemetry on ten meters using basically normal ham radio shortwave gear, then there was a complicated little decode algorithm to convert raw data into actual data.

Another thing I miss is there are/used to be FM voice "easy sats" requiring pretty basic VHF/UHF FM gear. Very popular. Need more of those. I believe there's only one working ezsat in orbit right now and the hope is the FOX-1 project will deliver another working one later this year.

I also miss the high altitude / 12 hour pass Molinya orbit sats. Thus requiring fancy gear, but the highly elliptical orbits meant you could talk for hours instead of 10 minutes horizon to horizon.

So there's a lot of stuff to google for.

Ham radio is a fun, big hobby. Life's too short to actually do or try everything possible even in just the narrow confines of satellite operation, much less everything else.

While I'm not going to dispute this, I do disagree with it.

> First of all why do they care if public is interested in space? Aren't they after all, looking to run a successful and profitable business?

These goals aren't distinct. What's hard for people to remember is that running a successful and profitable business is a means. It's a how; the real question is what the end goal is. For a painfully large number of businesses, the goal appears to be making the CEO rich. But some groups, some CEOs, some businesses have goals that a lot of us would consider better: actually advancing humanity forward or providing quality service or the like.

a) The vast majority of satellites are "prototypes." They're built a few at a time, extensively tested, then launched. In the case of satellite frameworks like Cubesat, they're open source and tested every time someone launches one.

b) This is not untested tech, at all. Cubesats have been using consumer technology in satellites extensively, both by startups, hobbyists, and academia (doing advanced stuff like orbital reconfiguration, atmospheric sampling, telecommunications, etc). Combined with NASA's existing suppliers for aerospace grade components, these satellites which have a really high success rate.