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An acquaintance of mine is building a rocket of roughly the same size. But with two important differences: 1) It will go into space (defined as 100 kilometers
by mixmax 18y ago
An acquaintance of mine is building a rocket of roughly the same size. But with two important differences:
1) It will go into space (defined as 100 kilometers above the surface of the Earth)
2) He will be aboard
He recently finished building the worldst largest amateur submarine, so I think there's a pretty good chance he's going to pull it off. They plan to launch from a barge in the North Sea, and have apparently just gotten the official go-ahead from various agencies. The boosters will run on pure oxygen and epoxy, and they have had multiple successful booster tests.
http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
- Femur 18y agoThat is just plain awesome. This is the type of Hacker/Tweaker/Discoverer attitude that makes me smile from ear to ear.
- mixmax 18y agoInterestingly he is doing it all basically without any money, just a lot of smart and dedicated people. He also says that his biggest problem isn't technical, it's getting all the official licenses, approvals and documents in order. The government doesn't really know what to do when some guy calls up and asks if it's OK that he fires himself into space from a home-made rocket.
- jedc 18y agoSurely it's not too different from what Scaled Composites had to do when they built/launched SpaceShipOne. (Yes, stationary launch is different from air-launched, but the regulatory approvals as I understand them have to do with space, not ground launch.) That of course doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ass...
- Femur 18y agoNote that in this case the group is launching from Denmark, so approvals and regulations are different than what Scaled Composites (a US company) had to go through.
- mixmax 18y agoThey are currenly thinking about using the submarine to tow the barge with the rocket from Copenhagen to the North Sea, and just getting that journey approved is a huge problem. The department of defense seems to have a negative opinion about a submarine towing a huge rocket through Danish territorial waters :-) There are many obstacles like that.
- whacked_new 18y agoMewonders what's going to happen as people start calling about space insurance programs. Still a long shot, but probably faster than the government can finish scratching its head.
- drinian 18y agoHopefully they will fare better than Rocket Guy: http://ask.metafilter.com/72873/What-happened-to-Brian-Walker-the-Rocketguy http://ask.metafilter.com/72873/What-happened-to-Brian-Walke... He was planning a H2O2-based suborbital launch. Guess he chickened out.