Gadgetory

so honestly I think the idea comes off as kind of crazy to the uninitiated have you ever dreamed of having your own spacecraft I'm Zach a grad student in aerospace engineering at Cornell and I'm going to fundamentally change the way that people think about and take part in space play the aerospace industry in particular is pretty conservative there's ways of doing things that were figured out in 60s and 70s that work so people you know sort of take the if it isn't broke don't fix it mentality i think a lot a lot of people say all you know it's we haven't been to the moon since you know 60 70 s and know why we're not exploring anywhere what's the point of going up there but when you start to actually get into the science of it the things you can do from satellites it's pretty impressive nations kind of a risk-averse these days we start out under NASA's umbrella but when the Columbia crashed yes I cut about a billion dollars worth of programs the private sector could never have done what NASA did in this 50s and 60s but the great thing is they did it so now the private sector doesn't have to I mean that's the point right I think NASA existed at that time before any of this had been done when no one knew how to do it now private companies can take that knowledge and that experience that NASA developed and you know run with it the project is called sky cube sky cube is a satellite it's going to orbit the Earth for about three months sending back tweets from space pictures from space we will provide this application where you can just sent typing a message press the button if you get delayed all the way up to the satellite and if you send it back in you radio and then we will trigger a special release of a large balloon and it will become pretty much the most visible star in space so these are actually as far as i know the world's smallest satellites and we're going to pack about 200 of these little satellites inside here and let them loose in low-earth orbit and for for a donation of about three hundred dollars you can have your own tiny satellite in space arta set is arduinos in space the idea is to create a space development platform to put something in space that people can access write their own code get their own data and just run their own ideas they will be able to go on to internet log on to our satellite upload their code or the application of the game that they wrote and then run it receive data receive feedback you know maybe take some pictures let's do the satellite around and have a true space experience right now we're working on our third generation space suit it's an IV a suit that means intervi hick Uhler activity so it's in case of emergency use only and that we're designing it to be flight sort of funny imagine you have a ball on the string and you're spinning it over your head the string in the middle stays straight right expand that to an earth-sized system the earth rotates then you have a counterweight satellite deep out in space with a long strong string attached back to the earth the earth elevator we just simply don't have the materials to build it yet we just don't have that technology yet about a year ago our team kind of came up with a breakthrough and we can build a lunar elevator now with current technology we tried you know for a couple of years to go through the more traditional academic funding routes writing research proposals and grants we're coming up short every time Silicon Valley only invests in ones and zeros if they can't predict how you're going to be the next Instagram you are not getting funded by Silicon Valley we live in a very rich world I mean there's there's lots of resources and there's a long tail on it there are lots and lots of people who they can't contribute 10 million dollars but they can contribute ten dollars and Kickstarter is a way of accessing that Kickstarter's really what's enabled us to move forward with this and fly it and make the sort of progress that's been made on the project the last year it doesn't sound very appealing to me to give up equity in the company and that was part of the draw of Kickstarter I mean we went from napkin to help one person kicks at our campaign in four months in you know to a high-altitude balloon launch in five months to assign launch consequence six months we originally set our goal our sort of bare minimum goal to do the project at about thirty thousand dollars that's sort of the bare minimum we thought we need to build something and we ended up making over seventy five thousand dollars seventy five thousand dollars for two or three months of work is pretty good in my book it's not a tremendous amount of money that we raise twenty seven thousand dollars is not very much money even for just a space suit we anticipate flight certified space suits for rocket companies like SpaceX constantly in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars from one suit have a hundred thousand dollars about forty five goes into just fulfilling the Kickstarter obligations yeah that's a lot of t-shirts the biggest pressure was Kickstarter's limit in donation they have a ten-thousand-dollar donation lemon I would have set the suit at 18 to 20,000 for a backer and we were kind of forced because of that limit to set a ten-thousand-dollar suit and the public perception is we're going to build an elevator on the mode so we better use the little bit of money that we have as a catalyst as a resource to go out and do the rest of the stuff when I was looking at the options for for participation I realized that there's an opportunity to actually hit the launch button on this fascinating project and I contributed ten thousand dollars which was the highest contribution opportunity that was available we want to create enthusiasm about space we want people to know yet it's up there takes huge rockets to get up there but you yourself can fund something up there what we wanted to do was first check that you weren't as I said drinking your own kool-aid because we're all and that's about space and I love it but we wanted to make sure that they're actually where people out there who want to design stuff as well you can't really structurally think about it you need a diverse group of people called you know eight billion come up with all sorts of crazy ideas and what Kickstarter allows and crowdfunding and generally allows is that you can take those crazy ideas and you just test them in the market within four weeks you know do people like it people don't like it and if people don't like it you don't raise your money education is an important piece of being engaged into this process Space Sciences it was a new area that I didn't know much about I think space is just fundamentally inspiring and cool and I mean it's still the final frontier it really is i mean it's somewhere that only if a few hundred people in the history of mankind of every band people can participate in space in a way that they couldn't even like a decade ago when it gets to where you can fly into space basically as easily as you can fly across the Atlantic fifty years ago then we're going to see some real innovation the platform like Kickstarter allows projects to be put in a domain out there where individuals with a common purpose it's not about success or failure but it's about what the purpose is and how many people can align behind it and when you have that working you've got a very powerful force I think science and technology so that they're always been the way forward even if we don't really know what to do with it when it comes along the first time I think it's part of the human condition that you have to you know keep reaching for new stuff and keep trying