N-Prize Founder Paul Dear Talks Prizes For Nanosat Race

Rob Goldsmith writes to point out this interview with Dr. Paul Dear, founder of the N-Prize, and explains: "For those of you who haven yet heard of the N-Prize, the N-Prize is a £9,999.99 (sterling) cash prize which can be claimed by any individual, or group, who are able to prove that they have put into orbit a small satellite. The satellite must weigh between 9.99 and 19.99 grams, and must orbit the Earth at least 9 times. This project must be done within a budget of £999.99 (sterling)."

Get into orbit for a grand?

I wonder if bribing someone at NASA or ESA to include your mini-satellite as part of the payload of the next launch would be acceptable; it's probably the most realistic chance...

Re:Get into orbit for a grand?

From the rules at http://www.n-prize.com/ [n-prize.com] --

15. Piggybacking and Shared Resources
Entrants may not 'piggyback' on other aerospace projects (for example, by launching a satellite as a passenger on a larger launch vehicle). If they do so, the entire cost of the launch will be considered part of the budget of their N-Prize entry. Similarly, no two entries (whether simultaneous or consecutive; whether by the same entrant or different entrants) are allowed to share the cost of common hardware (for example, if a single launch vehicle carries two satellites, then the total cost of the launch vehicle will be considered part of the budget for each of the two satellites).

What?

This guy just have a fetish for the number 9 or something?

At least it's a new one, can't find a term for it anywhere.

Re:What?

This guy just have a fetish for the number 9 or something?

Nein.

English - English Translation...

"For those of you who haven yet heard of the N-Prize, the N-Prize is a $19,636.90 (dollars) cash prize which can be claimed by any individual, or group, who are able to prove that they have put into orbit a small satellite. The satellite must weigh between 0.35 and 0.71 ounces, and must orbit the Earth at least 9 times. This project must be done within a budget of $1,963.67 (dollars)."

Re:English - English Translation...

Launching it for a couple of grand? Maybe. I'm being serious, really, I can conceive it.

However, a satellite weighing less than three quarters of an ounce yet able to be detected on the earth would most likely need an aluminum-foil dish or something, which would most likely take all the weight, and then you'd need some sort of support structure (Even if it's just wires or even tubes of air) and some sort of engine on it to make sure it made it around the earth a few times...I just think the weight requirements are the real killer here.

Re:English - English Translation...

Um... as a rocket engineer, I'm afraid what you are arguing makes no sense...

1. Space is an altitude. Orbit is a velocity. You can orbit 1 inch off the ground if you could some how sustain 8 km/s - for example, if you put a pipe filled with vacuum surrounding the Earth. So to get to orbit, you need a lot of speed, not a particular position.

2. GEO orbit (35786 km) is really hard to get to - and pretty pointless, really. Go above 400 km and you will hang around quite a while.

3. If you are in an orbit, you cannot possibly be a risk to airplanes. (Except on the way down, and even then the risk is way smaller than the risk caused by ducks, etc. - assuming you can even survive reentry)

Probably the easiest way to win this is with a mylar balloon as the "satellite". You could make a very large, highly reflective surface that would last a few orbits.

That said, this is unlikely to be won - $2K is just too low, it will cost more than that to get flight insurance / government permission.

Re:English - English Translation...

Of course, as we watch the US dollar continue to lose value, we can take advantage of an increasing budget limit for the same here in the states.

Re:English - English Translation...

But only pot dealers. Cocaine and heroin come in metric... or so i've heard.

Re:English - English Translation...

You know in England when they switched to metric in bars they went from getting a pints to half litres and the price went up, man.

Beer is still sold in pints (and half-pints) in England. Really.

Tight budget

£999.99 could probably buy enough menthos and coke to launch the projectile.

Slingshot

Hmm, with a budget of ~$2000, I just need $1000 worth of rubber tubing and two mountains. Anybody want to design the satellite?

A rocket scientist asks...

WHY!?

Is this some prototype for a global diamond delivery system? Serious, apprise me of the value of putting less than an ounce of something into orbit. And it's the "orbit" part that's tricky. A sufficiently large model rocket can do Alan Shepard-esque sub orbital flight. But to then pop it into orbit with a "circularizing burn" is tricky... on a budget.

I'm trying to not be a troll here, but this prize is designed to develop a $2K ICBM for very tiny payloads. If you put VX gas into something that might survive reentry, you'd have the plot for an Austin Powers movie. I'd call it "MoonShagger: It's a gas gas gas."

Re:A rocket scientist asks...

FACT: there is absolutely no sensor or computer technology in the world that weighs a under and ounce and never ever will be!

Yeah. Sputnik weighted 83.6Kg

You need to get an antenna and transmitter powerful enough to be trackedfrom earth an weighting 20 grams. Or put up some sort of light radar reflecting sail (only has to orbit 9 times on LEO and burn up, doesn't say it has to do anything useful).

I wonder if the tracking side is included in the budget or if you can borrow some really big antenna to try to detect the junk you put up.

Re:A rocket scientist asks...

In a better world... True that!

But most things that involve BOTH propellant and the word "Cool" violate the National Association of Rocketry Safety Code. Let alone the Patriot Act!

Re:A rocket scientist asks...

For the curious, the "throw" of a rocket is determined by the following equation:

delta-V = 9.8 * Isp * ln (Mass1 / Mass2)

Where delta-v is the change in velocity required (8-10 km/s for orbit), mass1 is the lift off mass, mass2 is the on orbit mass, and Isp is the specific impulse which is a parameter of engine design primarily effected by propellant choice. Isp varies between 100 and 450 seconds - the SSME is 450 seconds, an estes model rocket gets 100 or so seconds.

So the above example is a back of the envelope calculation for a conceptual rocket - mass1 is 10 kg, mass2 is 0.5 kg, Isp is 280 s. This gives you a delta v of 8.2 km/s, which is enough to reasonably be expected make orbit (assuming that orbit is possible at all, of course - I mean the basic engineering premise is a bit of a stretch, but the physics works).

Brilliant meme!

What a brilliant marketing meme: with just one borderline-ludicrous sentence, he managed to get many thousands of people talking, got his name in the news, launched a website, and promoted the website creation company, all at practically no cost, backed up (should someone ever achieve the borderline-ludicrous challenge) by a home-equity loan. The publicity-to-signal ratio is huge, at miniscule cost.

Those guys got it backwards

*Prices* look like 9,999.99 so they appear small.
*Prizes* should look like 10,000.00 so they appear big.

Why an upper weight limit?

If you can get something in orbit for about $2k, I don't see why an upper weight limit would matter. Satellites are made as light as possible to keep down the cost of the launch, so I would think the goal would be to make the thing as heavy as possible within that budget. Whole thing seems stupid.

Re:What is a sterling? Pound?

It's pound sterling, but I guess that £ only stands for pound so they felt it necessary to say sterling too. Whatever, I'm from Georgia and played in the mud as a child, so I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be trying to answer this.

Re:What is a sterling? Pound?

The official name is Pound Sterling and normally use to distinguish from other countries currency. The plural is Pounds Sterling. Informal, and not officially, is British Pound.

The pound sign comes from "L". Where LSD - librae, solidi, denarii - was originally used in duodecimal from pounds, shillings and pence.

I never in my life thought that history lesson from high school would ever come in hand.

Re:What is a sterling? Pound?

It's a pound that's 92.5% pure

Re:What is a sterling? Pound?

Why is that a *whoosh*? It is correct.

The original "Pound Sterling", way back when, was just that -- one pound of Sterling (92.5% pure) silver.

Re:What is a sterling? Pound?

From Wikipedia:

Name

The full, official name pound sterling (plural: pounds sterling) is used mainly in formal contexts and also when it is necessary to distinguish the currency used within the United Kingdom from others that have the same name. Otherwise the term pound is normally used. The currency name is sometimes abbreviated to just "sterling", particularly in the wholesale financial markets, but not in amounts; so "payment accepted in sterling" but never "that costs five sterling". The abbreviations "ster." or "stg." are sometimes used. The term British pound is commonly used in less formal contexts, although it is not an official name of the currency. A common slang term is quid (plural quid).

The term sterling is derived from the fact that, about the year of 775, silver coins known as "sterlings" were issued in the Saxon kingdoms,[6][dubious - discuss] 240 of them being minted from a pound of silver, the weight of which was probably about equal to the later troy pound. Because of this, large payments came to be reckoned in "pounds of sterlings", a phrase that was later shortened to "pounds sterling". After the Norman Conquest, the pound was divided for simplicity of accounting into 20 shillings and into 240 pennies, or pence. For a discussion of the etymology of "sterling" see Sterling silver.

The currency sign is the pound sign, originally with two cross-bars, then later more commonly £ with a single cross-bar. The pound sign derives from the blackletter "L", from the abbreviation[citation needed] LSD - librae, solidi, denarii - used for the pounds, shillings and pence of the original duodecimal currency system. Libra was the basic Roman unit of weight, derived from the Latin word for scales or balance. The ISO 4217 currency code is GBP (Great Britain pound). Occasionally, the abbreviation UKP is used but this is incorrect. The Crown dependencies use their own (non-ISO) codes: GGP (Guernsey pound), JEP (Jersey pound) and IMP (Isle of Man pound). Stocks are often traded in pence, so traders may refer to pence sterling, GBX (sometimes GBp), when listing stock prices.

You are designing a cannon to launch satellites

The simplest way to launch satellites is to design a great big gun. The U.S. did some experiments with this with Project HARP [wikipedia.org]. They were abandoned because manned flight required lower g-forces. However, if you just wanted to put a satellite into orbit, then guns can make sense.

Unfortunately, the last guy to try this (Gerald V. Bull), went on to attempt to build a super-gun [wikipedia.org] for Saddam Hussein, and then mysteriously got shot [wikipedia.org] (possibly by Israel's Mossad).

I'm not sure I want to win this contest. There have been quite a few projects in the area, and they all get canceled.