NASA has three smartphones orbiting the earth as mini-satellites

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...

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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.

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Re:NASA has three smartphones orbiting the earth as mini-sat... by vilhelm_s on Friday April 26, 2013 @02:56PM (#5614739)

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.

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Re:NASA has three smartphones orbiting the earth as mini-sat... by jnw2 on Saturday April 27, 2013 @01:44AM (#5616944)

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

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