I have come across a couple of very interesting things in the last couple days.
1.) There is a guy working on the N-Prize (previously discussed prize to get a nano-sat to orbit) and he has a long discussion on what the size and mass of a tiny orbital rocket. http://www.littlemonsterrocket.com/news/overview-of-the-lmr-n-prize-approach/ He comes up with super tiny number of 75kg GLOW (Gross vehicle liftoff weight) which seems entirely ridiculous. However, his methodology is sound. The reason it's so light is because he thinks he can build his stages and motors really light and not have them fall apart. It's one of those things that works on paper, but I would be suspicious of them happening in real life. The most interesting thing in my mind is how sane he seems at the beginning, and that his analysis basically follows ours, but with less conservative stage masses. He talks about rockets are cheap and are understood, while all this balloon, turbojet (sorry Ben ^_^ ), kite launch, etc. is too out of the box for a place to start. He talks about other groups that are all CG and advertising and have nothing to show for it and how 3 stages is a good conservative place to start for orbital, even though single stage to orbit (SSTO) is theoretically possible. He thinks he can get great ISP by running LOX/hydrocarbon, and light mass with really low chamber pressure motors (so they can be self pressurized and thin walled). Anyway, I'll let everyone read it if they want, but he answers many questions about how he gets his numbers in this following post that would also be good to read: http://www.littlemonsterrocket.com/news/the-numbers-game-of-the-n-prize-quick-and-dirty-feasibility-overview-simulator-and-a-1000-challenge-/ B.) I heard through the grape vine (aka, twitter) that apparently at the smallsat conference (http://www.smallsat.org/) NOAA announced that they noticed that all these little cubesat projects have cameras in them and suddenly wants to start enforcing the "Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992" and forcing anyone with a camera (yes, that includes crappy webcams) to get a "remote sensing licence." I found a link to http://www.crscompliance.noaa.gov/ which explained the act and their jurisdiction over any remote sensing device on US owned spacecraft. Although as of this afternoon the site suddenly seems to be down (403). Strange. Anyway the Google knows all and sees all and has a cache of it if you want to read it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7iyykqPHzzIJ:www.crscompliance.noaa.gov/+crscompliance.noaa.gov&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us I would categorize this as a rumor at the moment, but it is something to keep an eye on. -Nathan
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