What this means is that the major obstacles for going into space have been cleared (reliable engine, logistics around sea launch, active guidance) so the next launch will be Heat2x, which has the potential to reach an altitude of 130 km. Space starts at 100 km.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with Copenhagen Suborbitals, and managed the livestreaming of the event.
Thus electronic ticket systems :) The local government her in Oslo, Norway are working on something similar[0]. It should have been finished in 2005.
Now after massive cost overruns they have scoped it down and will soon demolish part of the system (the ticket barriers at the railway station), but still keeping some of it. And of course they have now also started to talk about a new system, this time requiring everyone to have a smartphone with them ( what will happen if your battery runs flat?).
> What this means is that the major obstacles for going into space have been cleared (reliable engine, logistics around sea launch, active guidance) so the next launch will be Heat2x, which has the potential to reach an altitude of 130 km. Space starts at 100 km.
This seems to imply a ballistic trajectory. Still an impressive feat, but getting to orbital velocity seems to be as hard (if not harder), than getting to 100km.
Their primary income is from the support organisation. It costs 100 Danish kroner a month (roughly $20) and there are around 700 members. So they live on roughly $14.000 a month, or $170.000 a year.
Needless to say there is a lot of ingenuity in costcutting, a lot of parts from home-depot....
Even though the small budget is very impressive, we wouldn't mind to have more members in the support group. Ahem... :-)
http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
Wouldn't you still need to be able to retrieve the rocket? I mean it isn't a big issue that Sapphire rest on the bottom of the Baltic, but if Peter Madsen ends up there.
Would that make Denmark the fourth nation to independently achieve manned space flight, behind Russia/USSR, USA and China? Or is it disqualified for not being government run?
They don't have active plans for manned missions right now iirc, but I would venture to guess that if they wanted to, they could put someone up there without too much effort. The most immediately obvious hurdle is that they would need a human-rated pressurized reentry vehicle.
Perhaps, but the record is to put a human in space. The Soviets won most of the space race, because they did most of the milestones first. In the terms of race; Denmark could beat Japan if Japan never puts a human in space beforehand.
Of course, saying 'Denmark' in this context seems a bit weird, as it is not our government pushing it, but volunteers. But I will admit it does make me a little proud to be Danish. One of those few times.
The youtube channel is the best way to catch up with the project. There are some cool videos of engine tests and a handful of very professionally edited videos of the team explaining different stuff
It shows that the active guidance works as expected. Active guidance is extremely difficult. The hardware is difficult because you need to design jetvanes that work under extreme pressure, and in a 3000 degree jet exhaust. The software is difficult because it needs to be extremely reliable while still compensating for a lot of factors such as wind, spin, air density, etc. and you can't test it, so there is no space for bugs.
No amateurs have ever even attempted active guidance before, and getting it right in the first go is a huge accomplishment.
Regarding testing, aren't there any possibilities of testing just parts of the software, possibly via simulation, or is everything so inter-dependent that a live physical test is the only way to go? It's pretty impressive to get something so complex right in the first try! Props!
You can of course test subsystems, how they play with each other, I/O, etc. But the main job of actually sending the rocket straight up is not testable. You could build simulations, but they wouldn't help much since there are so many parameters, unknowns, etc. that building an accurate simulation would probably be as expensive as a test.
This is incorrect, there have been successfully flown, actively stabilised, passively unstable model rockets made by amateurs before. E.g. Gyroc in the UK.
michael.sdf-eu.org/Gyroc/
There have also been a few in the states. All passively unstable too.
It looks like turbulence or presure spikes on the chamber at ignition, depending the magnitude that could lead to a explosion (I just an aficionado, so take this opinion for what it´s worth) I also follow the sugar rocket to space project, and I think they had some problems with this, and with cracking in the propellant. Is the data from the launch available?.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with Copenhagen Suborbitals, and managed the livestreaming of the event.