
16-Year-Old MIT Admit Sends Her Admission Letter Into Space & Films the Journey  - ilamont
http://bostinno.com/2012/02/06/after-a-16-year-old-gets-accepted-to-mit-she-sends-her-admission-letter-into-space-films-the-journey-video/
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Game_Ender
Can we stop referring to these high altitude balloon payloads as going "into
space"? At 91000 feet up, he is over 70 km from the official edge of space,
and 130 km from lowest satellite orbits.

EDIT: The soon to be MIT student correctly refers to it as a "near space"
flight, but the context was changed to increase the link bait factor.

~~~
drostie
Even worse, the reporter says "She took her admissions letter and then
rocketed it into space." As if there were a rocket involved.

I mean, I like high-altitude ballooning, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying
that this sentence primed me to expect something an order of magnitude cooler,
someone strapping 250 grams of aluminum-based rocket fuel to their acceptance
letter and watching it blast off.

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pchap10k
Wow a lot of jealous comments in this thread. I'm feeling it too. Why didn't
my dad work at JPL and teach me physics and electrical engineering on his
knee!?!

Seriously, not everyone with her opportunities wouldve converted it into her
accomplishments. Sure she had chances, but she brought her own drive and
determination.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ok, I laughed out loud here.

Allow me to relate a bit of personal history. I'm kind of a nerd, shocking I
know, but its true. And have a fairly large number of toys around the house
and have lived the 'hacking' lifestyle for my whole life. When my daughter was
9 [1] she was part of a team I put together to compete on the short lived
'Robotica' series. When she was 10 and wanted a computer for her room I gave
her a VAX running NetBSD. (and VMS although NetBSD was much more
approachable). She went to Reed College as an art major! (although when she
graduates her degree will be in physics, go figure).

The point though (besides being able to brag about my kids, another sin I'm
guilty of) is that if your parents did work at JPL and do rocket science there
is no guarantees that _you_ would be interested in rockets. As a parent all we
can do is try to expose the kids to as many things as possible in an effort to
allow them to discover their passions earlier rather than later. It is
tremendously challenging as a parent to help your kids discover these things,
but it is so valuable to them later on.

[1] <http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/killerB.html>

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ck2
I'm not going to be impressed anymore until someone puts a camera into orbit
for a few revolutions.

~~~
nekojima
I had thought I might buy the necessary material and write out the required
instructions to do this and give them to three six and seven year olds for
them to assemble and launch (with adult help to carry the tank & fill the
balloon).

So far their mothers say yes, they have a sense of humour & don't think I will
actually let the kids do it without a lot of help. Their fathers say no,
likely because of their own selfish lack of input in building it and they
think they might have to pay for the project (ie the damages if it goes
wrong). I will have to try some more and hopefully in a few weeks will have
convinced them to try this experiment.

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Tichy
Just wondering: how do you get into MIT at 16, and is it worth it? I mean
would you be missing out as a 16 year old at MIT (or any other university)
because your peers are into other things than you, or is it an overall net
plus?

I assume that it is not some inherited genius that enables kids to get into
university, but some unique "strategy". Of course I could be wrong. I also
assume it would be doable without ruining the childhood, that is, the kid
should be naturally excited about science and stuff, not forced into it.

~~~
kwantam
I got into MIT at 16 and turned 17 during my freshman year. I can't say I ever
suffered socially as a result; I'm a very social person and had a large group
of friends at school.

As far as the strategy, if you can call it that: I wasn't getting much out of
high school and realized I could finish all my required classes in 3 years, so
I did. By far my most time consuming extracurricular activity was studying the
violin; until I entered MIT, I'd been primarily a musician, and I certainly
wasn't forced into science or engineering. I'd taught myself to program and
decided that EE/CS was an interesting career path, so I applied to MIT.

(Now I'm an integrated circuit designer.)

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tzs
Too bad they don't list what GPS receiver they used. Most GPS receivers, to
satisfy export restrictions, do not function above 60k ft or 1000 knots speed.

There is some ambiguity there, so some receivers only disable themselves if
you are above 60k AND above 1000 knots, so people doing high altitude balloon
work look for those, or they look for imported receivers.

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eiji
I wait for the day one of those "space" experiments by some high-school
student (and his parents) ends up crashing a jet engine or lands on a
windshield of a van going 80 miles/hour.

It's all fun until reality and hits you right in the face and you pay for your
YouTube video for the rest of your life. Is it likely to happen? No, but that
wont save you afterwards.

~~~
showerst
There are actually pretty strict rules for the high-altitude balloon people in
terms of payload weight/volume, and being visible to aircraft, both visually
and on radar.

<http://www.eoss.org/pubs/far_annotated.htm>

Basically they have to be made so that on any collision the payload will break
off safely, and that when it falls it won't seriously damage anything that it
hits.

~~~
btilly
That notwithstanding, if it lands on a busy interstate, it could be a problem.

The odds of it happening on any given trip are low. But in the long run every
weird coincidence will happen.

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qq66
What am I seeing in the video? It's not zoomed out enough to be the whole
Earth, but I see the Earth as a circle as if we can see one whole half of the
planet. Am I confused about how curvature appears from space?

~~~
orcadk
It's filmed using a GoPro in the 4:3 mode which results in a fish eye effect,
exacerbating the curvature of the Earth.

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JonnieCache
Note to self: must send balloon into near-space before it becomes wholly
passé.

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joering2
how hard and expensive would it be to make amateurish spacecraft and go into
the space? and obviously (which I think makes is so hard to do) come back to
Earth in one piece?

~~~
drostie
Well it depends how you want to get there.

Running the numbers, you need at least 1 MJ/kg to get past the 100km limit
into what's officially considered "outer space". That's only factoring in
Earth's gravity.

If we could do it with purely electrical motors, then assuming you pay 20
cents per kilowatt hour and only have a conversion efficiency of 10% into
actual lifting power, it would only cost you $0.60/kg energy-wise to get up
there. Assuming that you'd need to take an environment of, say, 10,000 kg with
you, the marginal cost would still only be about $6,000. That's something of
an ideal case, the "space elevator" proposal.

Solid rocket fuel, the numbers are a little harder to come by. It sounds like
the active ingredient is usually aluminum. One page on Wikipedia suggests that
aluminum has an energy density of 31 MJ/kg (and my calculations based on
Wikipedia's "aluminum oxide" page agree) and that only 16% of solid rocket
fuel is aluminum. So that's 5 MJ/kg. Or roughly 4 MJ/kg if you take into
account that the fuel more or less has to push its own way up with you. (Not
all the way, of course, but I'm too lazy to do the calculation properly and
there's wind resistance anyway.) The first rocketry site on Google says that
they'll sell you 20 pounds of the stuff (9 kg) for something like 200 bucks,
or $22/kg. With the conversion factor of (4 MJ/kg fuel)/(1 MJ/kg lifted) = 4
kg lifted / kg fuel, the equivalent number is about 10 times higher -- you $6
per kg that you want to send into space, so the marginal cost is presumably
then something like $60,000.

Can we do better by bulk? Google says people sell the main ingredient --
ammonium perchlorate -- at $3,000 per metric ton. Aluminum is a bit pricier,
but I can find people selling large chunks at about $500/50kg, adding about
$1,500 to the above. Adding in the cost of the plastic binding, the raw fuel
components might cost $5/kg. So you're not going to get cheaper with rocket
fuel than around $15,000 per flight.

Of course, the spacecraft is going to be the more expensive bit, I'm sure. But
that's more complicated because maybe you can share that cost over five
successful runs before it accidentally kills someone dramatically and no one
buys it. I'm just saying that, even without that, based on fuel alone, it's
still going to be an order of magnitude more expensive than a trip to a far-
off land.

But these balloonists have the right idea. If you could instead send up a
camera, you could potentially get up there at a fraction of the cost,
something that hobbyists can do. "You know where this hat has been?" you could
say: "OUTER SPACE."

(Incidentally, getting to the height mentioned in the above article requires
only about 0.3 MJ/kg, so divide all the costs by 3. The 100km distance is
where you're officially in outer space as internationally recognized.)

~~~
joering2
thanks for your time!

