
Record-Breaking Amateur Rocket Launch - robg
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/workshop/4315103.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop
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mixmax
An acquaintance of mine is building a rocket of roughly the same size. But
with two important differences:

1) It will go into space (defined as 100 kilometers above the surface of the
Earth)

2) He will be aboard

He recently finished building the worldst largest amateur submarine, so I
think there's a pretty good chance he's going to pull it off. They plan to
launch from a barge in the North Sea, and have apparently just gotten the
official go-ahead from various agencies. The boosters will run on pure oxygen
and epoxy, and they have had multiple successful booster tests.

<http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/>

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Femur
That is just plain awesome. This is the type of Hacker/Tweaker/Discoverer
attitude that makes me smile from ear to ear.

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mixmax
Interestingly he is doing it all basically without any money, just a lot of
smart and dedicated people. He also says that his biggest problem isn't
technical, it's getting all the official licenses, approvals and documents in
order. The government doesn't really know what to do when some guy calls up
and asks if it's OK that he fires himself into space from a home-made rocket.

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jedc
Surely it's not too different from what Scaled Composites had to do when they
built/launched SpaceShipOne. (Yes, stationary launch is different from air-
launched, but the regulatory approvals as I understand them have to do with
_space_ , not ground launch.)

That of course doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ass...

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mixmax
They are currenly thinking about using the submarine to tow the barge with the
rocket from Copenhagen to the North Sea, and just getting that journey
approved is a huge problem. The department of defense seems to have a negative
opinion about a submarine towing a huge rocket through Danish territorial
waters :-)

There are many obstacles like that.

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drinian
I was there at the launch!

Some of the ingenuity that went into building a model rocket of this size is
remarkable. Talking to some of the folks involved afterwards, it turns out
that the mechanism to separate the rocket into two parts at apogee was built
from car seatbelt tighteners and an airbag.

It was heartening to see how many people showed up -- easily a thousand or
more.

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Gibbon
I submitted another article about the same rocket a week ago, if anyone is
interested: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571971>

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whacked_new
The space elevator can probably use some amateur innovatordom, although I
don't know how if at all that is possible. I have the impression that no
matter how good the amateurs get, boosters will always be a colossal waste of
fuel. Cool factor 1, space advancement factor 0.

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jmatt
This is a bit off topic but I always thought the easiest way to build a space
elevator was from space lowering it down to the planet. Not building it ground
up.

That being said I'm all about more amateur involvement and less regulations.
Or to say it another way, regulations should not be the limiting factor like
it is today.

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russell
I think it's the only way to make them. You start at a geosynchronous orbit
and play out a cable towards earth and another as a counterbalance towards
outer space. The counterbalance can be used to launch payloads towards the
planets.

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jakewolf
That's awesome! I used to launch model rockets in the early 90's at a De Anza
College parking lot.

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garply
wright brothers 2.0

