The launch barge Sputnik where all of the magic takes place. It’s no Cape Canaveral, but it gets the job done.
There aren’t many people in this world that haven’t at least dreamt about going to space at some time in their lives. It is one of those things that tickles the imagination so much that most of us view it as being completely impossible. For most of us, it probably is. But, there are some opportunities out there.
For those of you that happen to have an extra $200,000 lying around, there is always the Virgin Galactic route. As I understand it, they will bring space travel to pretty much anyone willing to pony up the money. However,
for those people who can’t afford it, or who are willingly to do a whole lot of work for it, there may be another option.
There are a couple of guys in Copenhagen, Denmark who are planning to launch themselves into space. There names are Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, and they dreamed about going into space their whole lives. The closest they got in the corporate world was when Kristian was working as a contractor for NASA. So they did what any normal person would do, they started their own space program, Copenhagen Suborbitals.
The Nautilus submarine pushes the launch pad out to the launch site. Not exactly the giant NASA crawlers, but very cool.
You could spend hours learning about these amazing guys from their blog on Wired.com, from their official launch site, or even from a great interview that my friend Nate McIntyre did with these crazy Danes. But, what is really amazing about these guys is how they are going about it.
The are using crowdfunding to generate revenue, which has already led to about half a million dollars in donations. It comes back to the idea that small contributions from large numbers of people can lead to a substantial amount of money. As impressive as that is, I am even more impressed by the fact that they are doing everything open source.
They are opening up all of their technology and research to anyone who wants to use it. They strongly encourage other people to outright copy them. See these guys aren’t interested in making money, they just really want to go to space, and help other people to do the same. They are everything that is great about dreamers who are also doers.
They have already performed a number of launches with varying degrees of success with their next launch set for this Sunday June 23,
A future test rocket in production.
if the weather holds out. The launch will be live streamed on oooojoooo.com starting at around 6 PM Pacific Time, June 22nd/8 AM Copenhagen Time, June 23rd.
If you could go into space on a DIY spaceship, would you do it?
The ability to do anything you can dream of is the real wonder of this story, so what other kinds of experimental things would you like to build or explore?
