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Flying your business card into space

Published on Nov 6, 2006 at 2:37 pm. 1 Comment.
Filed under rockets, space businesses.

Here’s an interesting little news bit that IÂ saw posted over at Ed’s site.Â It is about Xenotech Research’s new rockets.Â These rockets will be small rockets designed for suborbital or low Earth orbit payloads —Â most likely research payloads.Â One thing that makes these rockets sort of unique is that instead of launching from the ground, they will be launched while already high above much of the Earth’s atmosphere.Â Now, this is sort of like what the upper stage of most rockets do, anyway, but instead of a first stage lifting an upper stage to altitude, these rockets will use a balloon to lift them high into the stratosphere.Â This is a rocket design called a rockoon.Â Â The basic ideaÂ behind rockoons was developed in part by James van Allen, as I had mentioned in a previous entry.Â These new rockoons will be a major improvement over the initial designs from a half century ago.Â

As with any new rocket, you need to do a lot of testing before you are ready to accept commercial payloads.Â After all, if people are going to pay you to put something into space, you need to be sure that you can actually do it.Â So, the rocket engines have to be tested, the rocketÂ structure tested, and then test rockets flown.Â These tests are done in a series of small steps, each time making them more complex, until finally you do lauches with some ballast riding along having the size, shape,Â and mass of a future payload.Â Then, once you can put an inerty object into orbit, you are ready for paying customers sending satellites into orbit.

These rockets will be small, though,Â able to lift only small payloads.Â They won’t compete with Boeing’s heavy lift rockets.Â However,Â modern technology has permited miniaturizationÂ of electronic components to the point that a whole new class of tiny satellites, called picosatellites, can now be made.Â One type of picosatellite is the CubeSat, a small satellite, shaped like a cube of side length 10cm and mass no more than 1 kilogram.Â These CubeSats, or similar payloads,Â are the target payload for Xenotech’s Firefly rockets.Â

But the rockets need extensive tests before taking on CubeSat payloads.Â Now comes an interesting idea that they have had.Â Rather than testing with simple inert dummy payloads, they have decided to allow people from the public to pay a token amount to send something inert along as a payload.Â So, you can pay to send your business card (or similar object the same size and shape, like a photograph or a note card, or some such) into space.Â You can find out more about it here.Â It doesn’t cost much, and it is a cool thing to do as a novelty.Â After all, how many people do you know who have had their business cards flown into space?Â I’m thinking about it myself!

For only $10 you can fly your card on a suborbital flight.Â For double that, you can put it into orbit.Â However, be forewarned, these payloads will be in very low Earth orbit, and they will decay in only a week or two, burning up upon reentry.Â So, don’t expect your card to be put intoÂ orbit for all eternity.Â

Getting people to pay to send inert stuff into orbit on these test flights isn’t new to Xenotech.Â This past summer, I had posted about Bigelow Aerospace’s idea of your paying to fly objects into space on its tests of an inflatable spacecraft.Â Really, I think that this is a great way to generate public interest in space enterprise.Â And besides, it gets a tiny bit of money coming into the company on what would otherwise be a testÂ flight that did nothing but spend money.Â Now, I can’t imagine that the income from $10 business cards could come even close to the cost of flight, but it does bring in somethng, and nobody would pay to send a business card at the actual cost of flight!

So, if you want to have fun, send your business card into space.Â It costs only a few times more than a lottery ticket, and since you are almost certain NOT to win the lottery, this will be a lot more fun!