perfidy

Wired reports that InterOrbital is offering personal satellite kits for the low, low price of $8000.

“$8,000? That’s just the price of a cool midlife crisis,” says Alex “Sandy” Antunes, who bought one of the kits for a project that will launch on one of earliest flights. “You could buy a motorcycle or you could launch a satellite. What would you rather do?”

The hexadecagon-shaped personal satellite, called TubeSat, weighs about 1.65 pounds and is a little larger than a rectangular Kleenex box. TubeSats will be placed in self-decaying orbits 192 miles above the earth’s surface. Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver. After operating for a few months, TubeSat will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

“It is a pico satellite that can be a very low-cost space-based platform for experimentation or equipment testing,” says Randa Milliron, CEO and founder of Interorbital Systems.

That is pretty damn cool.

Just think what this will mean in the future, though.  If, ten years from now, you could launch a 10kg satellite for $2000 - think what kind of gear (made possible by another decade of the remorseless of Moore's Law) you could cram into a 22 pound satellite.  Christ, you could probably make a plausible hunter-killer sat that small.  Gun, targeting system, station-keeping; swarms, networking...

I am giddy with the thought of it.