* Mostly trial and error, surprisingly -- the idea was to keep everything in low power mode as much as possible, and see if solar panels would let us keep charg

* Mostly trial and error, surprisingly -- the idea was to keep everything in low power mode as much as possible, and see if solar panels would let us keep charge. Turns out that they can; one of the sats has panels. Another just has batteries and will die down. * Yes, definitely. One of the sats was even hand soldered. * You talk to NASA, the cost to launch one commercially would be around $20K. We mostly piggybacked on a rocket that was being tested. * Because there was no budget for following these things on the ground, honestly :) Plus it gets people involved. * We were talking about having these things detect circular cloud formations to indicate a possibly forming hurricane, and having a "real" weather sat take a better look on its next pass.