The often deranged postings of yet another hacker, pretending to be an Astronomer, pretending to be a hacker who has written a book or two for O'Reilly Media.
Just over a year ago now, the first ever project I backed on Kickstarterwas Kicksat. A project to put a swarm of small nano-satellites in orbit. The size of a couple of postage stamps each satellite has solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a micro-controller along with memory and sensors.
Today in the mail my souvenir satellite arrived, it's just 3.5 cm square. It's an engineering prototype, presumably one that failed verification, and it doesn't have it's solar cells attached, but otherwise its just like the ones that'll be flown into orbit.
An engineering sample of a flight ready Sprite nano-satellite.
At it's heart is a +Texas InstrumentsCC430F5137. It's a whole system on a chip based around an MSP430 CPU, a 16-bit RISC ulta-low power micro-controller, along with an onboard RF transceiver operating in the sub-1GHz bands, a real-time clock and an integrated temperature sensor.
As well as the big solder pads at the top of the board for the solar cell there are a number of unpopulated pads on the board, including space for some through hole components, so there is certainly room for more sensors to be added on the board itself, and the MSP430 has the capacity to handle them.
However the satellite is going to be entirely reliant on the solar cell for power, there is no battery back up on the board, and the satellite will only be able to operate on the Sun-ward side of its orbit. That means power is the limiting factor. The CC4305137 has good brown-out reset capability, probably one of the reasons it was chosen, however you have to wonder how much more can be crammed onto the board and still reliably operate.
While it's might not seem much beyond a shrunken down Sputnik at that point, the Kicksat is ground breaking. In just fifty-five years we've advance from the point where it takes the might of one of the world's only super powers to put something like this into orbit, to the point where several hundred of them can be put into orbit by a graduate student with some enthusiastic backers.
Despite the pessimism I often express at the way the space programme is going, this is something that gives me a lot of hope that we aren't going the wrong way. That we aren't starting a march towards the abandonment of technology and a slow fall towards an age of declining possibilities and narrowing horizons.
Kicksat, the CubeSat designed to carry hundreds of these small Sprite nano-satellites aboard, is now on track for launch in the autumn of 2013 onboard the CRS-3/ELaNa-5 mission. This will be the third Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) flight to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a +SpaceXFalcon 9 rocket. KickSat, along with 5 other CubeSats, will be hitching a ride as a secondary payload thanks to +NASA's ELaNa program.
This article was originally published on the O'Reilly Radar.
We may be living in the future, but it hasn't entirely worked out how we were promised. I remember the predictions clearly. The twenty first century was supposed to be full of self driving cars, personal communicators, replicators and private space ships.
Except of course all that has come true. Google just got the first license to drive their cars entirely autonomously on public highways, Apple came along with the iPhone and changed everything, three dimensional printers have come out of the laboratories and into the home, and in a few short years, and from a standing start, Elon Musk and SpaceX has achieved what might otherwise have been thought impossible. Late last year they launched a spacecraft and returned it to Earth safely. Then they launched a another, successfully docked with the International Space Station, and then again returned it to Earth.
The SpaceX Dragon capsule is grappled and berthed to the Earth-facing port of the International Space Station's Harmony module at 12:02 p.m. EDT, May 25, 2012. Credit: NASA/SpaceX
Right now there is a generation of high-tech tinkerers breaking the seals on proprietary technology, and prototyping new ideas, leading to an rapid growth in innovation. This generation, who are building open hardware instead of writing open software seem to have come along out of nowhere. Except of course they haven't. Promised a future they couldn't have, they've started to build it. The only difference between them and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Steve Jobs and those guys got to build bigger toys than the rest of us.
The dotcom billionaires are just regular geeks just like us. They might be the best of us, or sometimes just the luckiest, but they grew up with the same dreams, and they've finally given up waiting for the government to build the future they were promised when they were kids. They're going to build it for themselves. The same thing driving the Maker movement, and that generation of high-tech tinkerers, is the same thing that's driving the next space race.
Unlike the old space race, driven by national pride, and the hope that we could run fast enough in place so that we didn't have to start a nuclear war, this space race is being driven in part by personal pride and ambition, but also by childhood dreams.
A lot of big business seems confused by the open hardware movement, they don't understand it, don't think it's worth their while to make exceptions and cater for it. Even the so called smart money doesn't seem to get it, I've heard moderately successful venture capitalists from the Valley say that they "...don't do hardware." Those guys are about to lose their shirts. Makers are geeks like you and me, who have decided to go ahead and build our own future because the big corporations and the major governments had so singularly failed to do it for us. Is it any surprise that dotcom billionaires are doing the same? Is it any surprise that the future we build is going to look a lot like the future we were promised, and not so much like the future we'd be heading towards.
What do you do when you've changed the world? You do it again...
In a few short years, and from a standing start, Elon Musk and SpaceX has achieved what might otherwise have been thought impossible. Late last year they launched a spacecraft and returned it to Earth safely. Then they launched a second which successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) and again returned it to Earth safely.
"The impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination, of which road they should take...", John F. Kennedy
Working relatively independently of NASA and the other government agencies, and building their technology stack from the ground up, SpaceX has in under a decade already demonstrated Apollo-era capability. However their Dragon capsule is no Apollo, it's a flexible space transport system built with modern technology, whose full capabilities have yet to be demonstrated.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on the end of the Canadarm2.
SpaceX is the first commercial company to send a spacecraft into orbit and recover it successfully, something that only three governments - the United States, Russia and China - have ever done, and with the retirement of the US Space Shuttle they have the capability that only two governments - Russia and China - now posses. The European ATV and Japanese HTV have no return capability and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, and the US currently has no manned space capability.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft floats in the Pacific after returning to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). Credit: Mike Altenhofen/SpaceX
With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the Dragon is the only spacecraft in the world capable of returning significant cargo from the station as the Russian Soyuz has only minimal cargo capacity.
Space Stations
The first generation space stations; the Soviet Salyut and Almaz stations, along with the American Skylab station, were all monolithic designs. It wasn't really until Mir was flown with a modular design that we entered the modern era, it was the only second generation station to fly, with the US sitting on the sidelines resting on its Lunar laurels, and the Europeans seemingly uninterested in manned spaceflight.
The ISS and the docked Space Shuttle Endeavour, taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking on May 23, 2011. It was the first-ever image of a space shuttle docked to the International Space Station. Endeavour at left. European ATV cargo carrier at right. Credit: NASA/Paolo Nespoli
Today's ISS is a bastard child of the follow-on station projects from the various countries involved in space race; the Soviet/Russian Mir-2, the American Freedom project which included the Japanese Kibō Laboratory, and the European Columbus space station. None of which came to fruition separately, mostly due to budgetary considerations but also due to politics.
The first component of the ISS was launched in 1998, and construction began the Russian Mir station was still in orbit. The last manned mission to Mir was a privately funded Soyuz mission by MirCorp, in April 2000, which carried out repair work with the hope of proving that the station could be made safe. There was no return to Mir however which was deorbited the following year following the permanent occupation of the ISS, which began in the November of 2000.
OPSEK and Gateway
Despite being declare "complete" there are two more modules destined for the ISS are due for launch over the next couple of years, both from Russia. The Nakua module will serve as Russia's primary research module on the ISS. It will replace the current Pirs module, When that happens Pirs could become the first permanent ISS module to be decommissioned, and would be destroyed during atmospheric re-entry. The Node Module is intended as the primary core of the Russian OPSEK station. Initially attached to the ISS, it will be detached along with Nakua and some of the other Russian modules before the ISS is decommissioned and deorbitted, and used for the basis of a new station.
Recent proposals by Boeing call for some of the "left over" parts of the ISS program that are still on the ground, notably the unlatched Node 4, to be used to build a Exploration Gateway Platform to be located at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points to be used as a launch platform for deep space exploration, robotic relay station for moon rovers, telescope servicing and a deep space practice platform located outside the Earth's protective radiation belts. The new platform would be assembled at the ISS before being boosted towards the Lagrange point. If this came about it could drastically cut the cost of future manned Lunar, Mars or NEO missions, and would represent the first manned presence beyond low-Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended in the 1970's.
Commercial operations
With the launch of first Cygus spacecraft scheduled for October of November, the number of commercial companies with access to low Earth orbit will grow to two, although SpaceX will remain the only company with return capability. There is no immediate expectation that the US government, and NASA, is on track to regain any sort of direct access and commercial operators will therefore remain the only access to space for the US for the foreseeable future.
The decommissioning of the ISS, now scheduled for 2020, would leave no US government presence in space. Of course by then Bigelow Aerospace, already with two pathfinder launches under their belt (Genesis I and Genesis II), plan to have a human-habitable commercial station online. Tentative launch dates for the first modules are around 2014 and 2015, and Bigelow has reserved a 2014 launch slot on SpaceX's Falcon 9, although they have not yet announced the payload.
Unlike the ISS and previous stations Bigelow's station technology is different, and potentially game changing. Based on the TransHub technology and patents, which Bigelow bought from NASA when they were directed to discontinue work on module by the US Congress, Bigelow's inflatable modules will provide large useful volumes for a much smaller launch weight than traditional hard-shell modules.
By the time Bigelow is ready to launch its first station SpaceX should have a fully man-rated Dragon capsule, and possibly a crewed launch to the ISS under their belt. Earlier this month Bigelow and SpaceX teamed up to do joint marketing to international customers of crew transport on SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon up to the Bigelow BA330 space facility.
Bigelow has agreements with seven sovereign nations to utilize on-orbit facilities of the commercial space station: United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Sweden and the United Arab Emirate of Dubai.
Of course who knows what the Jeff Bezos and his skunk-works company Blue Origin are doing behind heir "cone of silence," beyond their initial test flight back in 2006 we heard very little out of the company until the beginning of September last year where they reported the loss of their second test vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 at an altitude of 45,000ft. I'm not sure most people were aware they were testing at those altitudes, at least not at the time.
Then there is Excalibur Almaz who are now planning to take customers to the Moon, with a ticket price of $100 million a seat.
History of the Soviet Almaz military program on which the Excalibur Almaz technology is based.
The company relies on the use of decommissioned Salyut-class spacecraft which Excalibur Almaz purchased from Russian. They currently own four reusable reentry vehicles and two station modules, similar to components of the Mir station and the currently flying Zarya module attached to the ISS.
Close to home
Somewhat overshadowed by SpaceX and Dragon, Virgin Galactic has announced that the FAA had given an experimental launch permit for its sub-orbital SpaceshipTwo and air carrier WhiteKnightTwo.
SpaceShipTwo flying with crew for the first time, during a dress rehearsal flight for its first free glide flight in 2010. Credit: Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composities
WIth this permit in hand Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are able to press ahead with the testing program and carry out rocket powered test flights of the new craft.
The long duration future
The new commercial space companies have ambitious plans; SpaceX's Red Dragon which may launch as early as 2018 and use a modified Dragon capsule to carry heavy instrumentation for a soft landing on the Martian surface, and as a precursor to a manned mission.
Artist's rendition of a Dragon spacecraft using its SuperDraco thrusters to land on Mars. Credit: SpaceX.
Almost complimentary to the push towards manned spaceflight from the commercial sector, is the arrival of Planetary Resources earlier in the year with a goal of developing a sustainable (and profitable) robotic asteroid mining industry.
The new space race
The US and Russian governments aren't doing planning any novel endeavours in space, and it seems the Chinese are determined to tread the path that the US and Russia has taken before them, their own station seems to be a mix-and-match copy of the historical Russian programme, although the capability of their Shenzhou spacecraft to leave the orbital module behind means that their station might grow incrementally and much more rapidly than the ISS.
The really interesting development work happening in the space industry right now seems to be going on in the private sector. The new space race has begun, it's between SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and the other commercial companies. The goal isn't national pride, it's part personal pride and ambition, as most of these companies are founded by individuals, and part profit motive.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on the end of the Canadarm2.
The Bigelow 
SpaceShipTwo flying with crew for the first time, during a dress rehearsal flight for its first free glide flight in 2010. Credit: Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composities
Artist's rendition of a Dragon spacecraft using its SuperDraco thrusters to land on Mars. Credit: SpaceX.