The author has a sever misunderstanding of physics. A weather balloon can get you to the "edge of space", yes, but orbit is an entirely different process. To be in orbit, you need a rotational velocity (travelling around the earth) in the order of 7.8 km/s. A weather balloon can't do that! If you were to simply go to space vertically and turn off the engine, you'd simply fall straight back down again - the only reason you can stay in orbit "indefinitely" is because your rotational velocity is great enough that you're constantly "missing" the earth. (see Newton's canonball - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cannonball)
The key issue with getting anything to orbit is the fuel cost. It's expensive, and pretty much impossible to avoid. Micro satellites work by weighing very little and fitting in spaces on the rocket that otherwise would be empty. There's still a fuel cost in doing that (Most chemical rockets have a cost to orbit of at least $10,000 / kg). It's unavoidable. The existing micro satellites (ie AmSats) have been launched on the generosity of the launching organisation (unlikely to happen with satellites designed to circumvent governments) and have a very high failure rate.
It's not impossible, but the project would need serious backing. Even more expensive than paying the cost of launching micro satellites would be actually developing their own launch platform (another suggestion in the article).
It's probably another case of a non-specialist reporter oversimplifying the information he was given to the point that the summary is no longer correct.
Hobbyists have sent balloons to "space" at 100,000 feet <http://www.brooklynspaceprogram.org/>; though that obviously isn't going to get you into orbit.
Groups like CU Spaceflight are experimenting with launching rockets from high-altitude balloons. The idea is that the balloon will get you through most of the atmosphere for dirt cheap, hopefully bringing launch costs down within the reach of private citizens.
A project like that could put a satellite in space using a balloon, just not in the way that you're thinking of. :-)
I've read a lot of technical stuff about rockets and space missions lately to the point of hurting my brain. I am not a rocket scientist (yet ;-) but I think what one needs is to launch a single robot in orbit while more components are sent to be assembled up there with balloons e.g. to build a unmanned space station. Could that work?
No. You'd avoid friction. You may be able to accelerate faster, meaning less waste (as you won't be fighting gravity for as long). And you'd gain potential energy by already being up so high. But there's still a minimum amount of energy you need to get to orbital velocity.
If you didn't burn fuel to match speeds, you'd smack into the robot, which will be moving at orbital velocity.
See, the way a satellite stays "up" is by moving really fast in a straight line perpendicular to the earth's surface, like this:
satellite earth
^-> falls "down"
| /
| |
d-0-b |
|
\
The satellite "falls" towards the Earth, but it's moving so fast that this "falling" just becomes part of a giant circle, around the earth. If it was any faster, it would shoot away (or move to a higher orbit). If it was slower, it would fall down to a lower orbit, and if it was too slow it would hit the atmosphere where it slows down even more (eventually crashing down).
"... launch a single robot in orbit while more components are sent to be assembled up there with balloons e.g. to build a unmanned space station. Could that work?"
No. What could work, with regard to a space station, is to send up thousands of robotic panels, and insert them into orbit at roughly the same spot. They would communicate with each other to figure out where they are in relation to one another, and then they would, one pair at a time, fire their own thrusters to come together, and permanently join with each other, to form not only the space station itself, but also the station's distributed computing system and sensor network. The robots might even go further, by generating an atmosphere, thus allowing for the station to be occupied by humans. We already have the ability to easily send up such robots, by using Orbital's Pegasus, which is launched by a modified L-1011 from 40,000 feet. All we really need is to design, build and test the robots, such that each is no more than 1,000 pounds, as well as scale up the process of building and launching those rockets, which is covered below, in an article by John Walker, co-author of AutoCAD.
I wonder whether it would be feasible to accelerate a balloon to LEO using an ion engine. It could use the hydrogen or helium in the balloon as reaction mass to go around pressure differential issues and build up horizontal speed as it goes up and loses lift.
The ion engines used in existing spacecraft produces similar thrust to a piece of printer paper in your hand - the thrusts of the engines are measured in terms of milliNewtons. They are useful in deep space situations, where (due to nuclear reactors or abundant solar cells) you're power rich but propellant poor, and don't have to deal with aerodynamic drag. Over a long period of time, an ion engine can yield big velocities. With drag forces though, they'd simply have no effect on a floating balloon.
A balloon could present a method of getting a lightweight rocket to a very high altitude before engine firing, reducing the drag on the rocket and allowing the rocket engine to be designed just for the very low air pressure environment at those heights (rather than the compromise that modern ground-launched rockets have to make), but the size of the payload would be limited by the balloon size (with approximately 1kg/m^3 of helium, you'd need a lot of helium to lift a rocket of any size).
If the atmosphere is thick enough to support your balloon, its thick enough that something as low thrust as an ion engine basically won't be able to let you reach a meaningful velocity.
I've had this smae idea many times! I really think its feasible but I can't do the math* either :-(
I've come to think there are many ways to reach orbit with our current levels of technology but it's just too expensive to do the R&D.
* I actually got suck on figuring out the helium required because everytime you add more helium it adds more weight which requires more helium and so on. It must need some kind of complex differential equation.
It's bit more complicated than that. The balloon lift will decrease with pressure, which will decrease with altitude but so will aerodynamic drag. Ion engines design for satellite operation also prioritize low reaction mass usage and I am not sure the low thrust is a hard limit or a design choice. The device could also use vertical thrust to compensate for the loss of lift and then gradually rotate until it reaches orbital speeds.
It's probably impossible with current propulsion technology, but it would be useful to have a number when it starts to be possible.
Don't forget people who have built a working manned submarine, sea-based launch platform and plan a suborbital flight at 100 kilometers. Their last launch had the biggest amateur rocket yet reaching 3 kilometers of altitude : http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
It's a great idea as far as creating your own communication system--definitely innovative. However, it's still not a solution to SOPA. Why? Because SOPA is legislation--and if they'll pass bad legislation against the internet they'll certainly pass bad legislation to govern anything else related to the internet. If such idea's like DIY networking that operated outside of government fiddle-able channels really caught on--you'd be certain there would be legislation to prevent individuals from using such technology.
The only way to stop things like SOPA (legislation) is to stop the people that support such legislation. Unfortunately, such a matter will require far greater innovation considering the scope of corruption in politics. By corruption I refer simply to the adage "money is power".
"... outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it floats."
At the moment it sounds as though no single country's legislation would be able to stop this, but perhaps countries could prevent users from connecting to it.
The other part is that the act of launching the satellites is likely outside of the law in most countries, at least without some form of permission.
My whole point was not the method they'll use to legislate such activities--it's that they will find a way. Don't to try slither around crappy legislation, focus on getting the proposers and supports of crappy legislation out of office.
I would think that the unspoken motivation is to at least have some sort of contingency plan for having free access to timely information should the political regime* shifts even closer to what used to be called tyranny. Obviously, if we find ourselves in a tyranny, it is game over if network infrastructure is a monopoly of the state and its corporate sponsors.
*: one can argue that it is appropriate to use the term 'regime' when government no longer reflects the foundational constitutional principles of the nation.
So suppose these satellites do go up, If they aren't in the jurisdiction of any single country, whats stopping the US(or any country) from just shooting them down?
The debris would be harmful to other satellites in orbit. Since it introduces significant risk, they cannot just shoot them down without a good reason.
I would imagine they are working on, or already have, methods for disabling satellites without blowing them up and nudging them out of a stable orbit.
Must be a way to ruin the solar panels with a laser or similar. I assume non-state actors won't be able to launch satellites that use a nuclear energy source?
The X-37 (or whatever it ends up being called in the future) likely could snatch them right out of orbit without harming anything. I have no idea if it would be worth the expense, but that sort of capability is almost certainly a goal of the design. I have no doubt that at least the USAF and maybe their foreign counterparts are very invested in just this problem.
A group that can launch a satellite in orbit is also capable of launching a nuclear weapon in orbit. (That is the reason the US was so freak by Sputnik).
So presumably the US is smart enough not to mess with such groups (even if they don't actually have nuclear weapons they would still be able to do great damage with conventional explosions or even a piece of rock).
Actually, if I recall correctly, most nations consider all airspace above them to be within their national boundaries.
Pretty stupid, I know, but probably one of those things that worked "well enough" until technology made it seem absurd.
I remember this came up because people were getting served process on airplanes, even if they never landed in the country/state beneath them at that moment.
Airspace, yes. Space space, no -- Jurisdiction doesn't extend above the atmosphere. Rather, objects in space are governed by and the legal responsibility of the country from which they launched, per the Outer Space Treaty.
The reason for this, by the way, dates back to a bit of cold war strategising which pre-dated even Sputnik. Both the Americans and Soviets decided that it was more important to be able to know what the other was doing than to extend their territorial claims up to orbit. This helped to keep the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction in a relatively static lock; otherwise it would have been far mor dynamic and dangerous. Therefore the US did not protest when Sputnik flew overhead, and the USSR did not object to American satellites; in 1967 this was formalised by the Outer Space Treaty:
Airspace sounds like it wouldn't include space without air, so maybe it should be called spacespace. That's a pretty interesting idea: the United States would own 1.9% of the observable universe.
"A space ownership issue of current practical importance is the allocation of slots for satellites in geostationary orbit. This is managed by the International Telecommunication Union. The 1976 Declaration of the First Meeting of Equatorial Countries, also known as the Bogotá Declaration, signed by several countries located on the Earth's equator, attempted to assert sovereignty over those portions of the geosynchronous orbit that continuously lie over the signatory nation's territory. These claims did not receive international support or recognition and were subsequently largely abandoned." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_real_estate
If the satilites are cheap enough (say €100) you just launch more. Let the whack a mole game begin.
Other factors: the space might not be owned by anyone but the satilites might be. Sure the US government in us courts for damages. Get an injunction ruok prevent them doing it again.
As far as I know, those "edge of space" low cost weather balloon experiments are a long way from putting something in orbit. The cost to put something in orbit is in the 1000s per pound range right (http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301)? I remember hearing something about ranchers putting up satellites in the early naughts, but I don't know how feasible that is.
Seems like a better solution would be strengthening the protocols, figuring out mesh networking solutions, rather that chucking cisco routers into space.
Even if they will manage to launch these satellites into orbit I still don't get how they going to get satellites connected to the internet? In order to be connected to the internet you need an IP addresses, but ip space actually ruled by american IANA organization and by a couple of RIRs. So, what would stop IANA from shutting down satellites ip addresses?
Sure, these guy can setup an internal network between satellites and ground stations, but every attempt to connect this network to the internet will result in gateway shutdown most likely.
Sorry for my english :-)
You can't shut down an IP. An IP is like a phone number, so you could close the subscription or even bust through the door and shoot the guy with it. But it makes no sense to talk about shutting down the phone number.
However assaulting something that is presently in space is really difficult and it is likely that physical violence would do no good at all.
IANA could "officially" revoke the ip block assignment, or even reassign the IP block to someone else. Then backbone router admins would have to decide whether to route the packets toward the satellite or toward the new owners of the IP block.
If we are able to get satellites into a low-level orbit, with the technology to connect those on the ground - surely a bigger risk is space debris and the possibility of colliding with other objects in space? From what I understand most, if not all space agencies do spend a fair bit of resources tracking and projecting the trajectories of all objects in space - and constantly altering the paths of those under their control to avoid such items? ... not saying it isn't impossible - but surely that's another challenge to take into account?
Hackers/engineers have been doing this for a long time already. It's just that they've been doing it with the backing of large governments or organisations until now.
The two types of feasibility that become important when you lose that backing:
Cost: can it be done cheaply enough?
Legal: not so much when the satellite is up, but the act of getting it up, and the act of communicating with it from the ground.
The key issue with getting anything to orbit is the fuel cost. It's expensive, and pretty much impossible to avoid. Micro satellites work by weighing very little and fitting in spaces on the rocket that otherwise would be empty. There's still a fuel cost in doing that (Most chemical rockets have a cost to orbit of at least $10,000 / kg). It's unavoidable. The existing micro satellites (ie AmSats) have been launched on the generosity of the launching organisation (unlikely to happen with satellites designed to circumvent governments) and have a very high failure rate.
It's not impossible, but the project would need serious backing. Even more expensive than paying the cost of launching micro satellites would be actually developing their own launch platform (another suggestion in the article).