> Imagine someday where many people own their own personal satellite.

Nice thought, but (unless the satellite is in geostationary orbit, very expensive) it won't work. Imagine having your own personal satellite that is only accessible for perhaps two short periods in 24 hours (for a mid-northern latitude location).

Better to have a subscription to a system with dozens of shared satellites in random orbits, available 24-7.

Having your own mapping/sensor satellite would be interesting. You'd need a polar orbit to get really complete coverage, but more likely most of what you'd be interested in is in the lower latitudes and some orbit that is inclined from the equator some amount is all you'd need.

[edit] Here's a catalog of satellite orbits courtesy of NASA: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OrbitsCatalog/

Thanks! I was actually (and perhaps naively) thinking only of a radio relay satellite, not one with optical sensors. Your description is much more interesting.

Once this happens -- once cheap optical survey satellites come into existence (and they will) -- governments are going to go completely nuts. Right now, governments can put pressure on the few survey satellite operators to blur out certain sensitive locations (as in a recent story posted here). But once cheap satellites come into existence, that option will evaporate.

Probably before that happens with satellites, it will happen with solar powered high altitude remote control planes, and mounted cameras. Consumer level not military spy drone level.

There's already a driver for this technology - flying the plane while wearing a head mounted display - a currently expensive niche hobby.

Depends on what you're using it for. If I'm just joining part of a crowd-sourced asteroid detection group (which would require some hardware other than what they put up), I don't need access to it 24/7, if I can batch up some photos I can collect them in batches, etc. I wouldn't use one of these for internet access or something, I've got much better options for that already.

My original post imagined only a radio relay satellite. You're talking about something that's much more interesting, a satellite with sensors and a way to relay its data to the surface. I'm sure this will happen eventually, and I agree it's a pretty exciting prospect.

In your scenario, a small number of overflights each 24 hours would be more than enough time to download the stored data.

The reason launching microsats is affordable is because they are piggybacking on someone else's rocket. The delta cost to launch a microsat on a rocket someone already paid full freight for is essentially zero.

There aren't any rockets going to the moon, much less another planet, that they can piggyback on... so, yes, they could send 1000 to orbit the moon, but you would have to pay full freight on the rocket. Ouch.

HOWEVER, upper-stages to move satellites to GTO are ejected out of earth orbit (for safety reasons - you don't want it to add to the space junk problem). These ejected stages are taken through an Earth-Moon Lagrange point, before being navigated on a low-energy path to a heliocentric orbit. There's no reason a microsat can't hitch a ride on an upper stage, and then wait until the ejected stage reaches the L-point before deploying itself, at which point it's downhill to anywhere in cislunar space.

People are currently working on doing this: http://www.lunarcubes.com/

Even if you were launching only microsats (without any other payload), I'm not sure the cost per satelite would be that high? Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_sy...) says the cheapest option right now is $2200/kg for LEO, so about $200 for a 100g phone. I guess going to the moon is about 10x more, but that's still not unreasonable...

You don't buy payload space by the kilogram. You buy it by the rocket, with the smallest launches costing millions of USD each. That per-kilogram figure is just the number that comes out when you divide the launch cost by the maximum theoretical payload capacity.

Of course. The proposal is to buy a rocket to send a large number of small satelites somewhere, and split the cost among the satelite owners.

SpaceX's Grasshopper project is likely to make the price come down a lot RSN.

These are in such low orbit that they're still protected by the Van Allen belts. They'd get obliterated by radiation if they were much higher or around the moon, etc.

It also isn't the first phone in space. The UK sent on up earlier this year.

I bet somewhere in the Pentagon they have wasted the money to developed a radiation hardened smartphone chip for them to fantasize surviving nuclear fallout.

If so, then NASA could use it for space?

This is an interesting read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening#Radiation-h...

Maybe they can just shield conventional chips with depleted boron.

I think Vernor Vinge has something like that in one of his end-of-civilization post-singularity novels, let's see... Marooned in Realtime, yes. (Great read, too.)

Nit: Marooned in realtime is one of Vinge's pre-singularity novels. Both in the sense that he hadn't come up with the term yet, and in the sense that the technology in the book isn't all that god-like.

(Not a bad read at all, yes.)

Marooned in Realtime does use the word singularity.

Sounds like a fun place to keep an off-site backup, if there's ever a way to get enough bandwidth without disrupting other systems.