Re:NASA has three smartphones orbiting the earth as mini-sat...
by maaku on Friday April 26, 2013 @02:45PM
(#5614677)
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/
Re:NASA has three smartphones orbiting the earth as mini-sat...
by vilhelm_s on Friday April 26, 2013 @02:36PM
(#5614626)
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...
Re:NASA has three smartphones orbiting the earth as mini-sat...
by maaku on Friday April 26, 2013 @02:48PM
(#5614697)
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.
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.